INTERVIEW: Michelle Aravena has a secret to tell about ‘Cabaret’
Photo: Cabaret features Michelle Aravena as Fritzie Kost. Photo courtesy of Julieta Cervantes / Provided by DKC O&M with permission.
NEW YORK — Michelle Aravena is having perhaps the most unique experience of any other actor on Broadway right now. She’s currently performing at the August Wilson Theatre … sorry, the Kit Kat Club … in the celebrated revival of Cabaret. Here’s the thing though: Most nights, she can be seen as Fritzie Kost, a character that is the combination of two roles (Fritzie, the Kit Kat Club dancer, and Kost, a tenant at a local apartment house). However, on select dates, she also understudies the role of Fraulein Schneider, typically played by Bebe Neuwirth.
This means that Aravena, when portraying Schneider, has arguments on stage with Kost, her other character. It’s as if the actor has the chance to be two sides of the same coin, and sometimes she’ll play one role during the matinee and that same evening, she’ll portray the other person on stage. Besides Neuwirth, she’s joined at the Kit Kat Club by Adam Lambert as the Emcee, Auli’i Cravalho as Sally Bowles, Calvin Leon Smith as Clifford Bradshaw and Steven Skybell as Herr Schultz. Together they bring to life a nightspot in Berlin in the pre-war years, but political changes are happening all around them … and the circumstances are getting direr and more devastating by the day.
“I’m super proud of the show,” Aravena said in a recent phone interview. “My situation was a little different because I was one of the cast members that joined almost six months ago with Adam and Auli’i and Calvin. There were about five of us that joined the company after the show had been running for six months, so it was a very brisk audition process. It kind of came out of nowhere, and the whole thing lasted maybe four days. And the next thing I know I was in rehearsals, and we learned the show, me and another gal, who was one of our vacation swings, learned the entire show in about a week and a half.”
The adrenaline of such a quick audition and rehearsal process definitely energized Aravena, who has appeared on Broadway in Beetlejuice, A Bronx Tale, Rocky, Jersey Boys, A Chorus Line and The Sound of Music. She said the nature of the business is that working actors don’t know what will be asked of them or what the next day may look like, so they need to pull up their bootstraps and be ready to deliver.
“Very, very hard work, and yes sometimes it is a small reminder to remember in those hard times that we are one of the lucky ones, at least I am one of the lucky ones that gets to make a living doing something I’m so passionate about, so in love with, have been dreaming about since I was a child,” she said. “Also getting to a certain age and being able to support myself and my lifestyle on something that some people might look at as not an incredibly lucrative career, and it just goes to show what we do for love, as is said in the famous A Chorus Line lyrics. Yeah, sounds silly, but every day is a blessing for sure.”
Aravena does have a secret that at first, when she began this journey with Cabaret, she was embarrassed to admit to her fellow company members. Now, six months in, she embraces this little-known fact about herself: She knew next to nothing to about Cabaret before auditioning.
“I had never auditioned for Cabaret, to be very honest,” Aravena said. “Anything having to do with the Holocaust, Nazis kind of always scared me and still does, so I don’t know if it was a subconscious moment where I was just like, yeah, Cabaret is not going to be a part of my life. So I came into this completely blind, which I think in some ways can be very, very helpful, especially when you’re doing a remounting of a show that has taken such a different direction, not as far as storytelling, but as far as imagery. To be very honest, I keep hearing how different our version is, and I just have nothing to compare it to. This is the version of Cabaret that I know, and I have to believe that as far as the story goes, not much has changed. We’re still telling the same story, and we’re still trying to deliver the same message. And unfortunately today it still is super vibrant and super important what we’re trying to say and the minds that we’re trying to change.”
The actor did talk about the combining of Fritzie and Kost into one character, which is a marked change from previous productions. Aravena reported that this modification was seamless and works from a narrative perspective. Kost uses Schneider’s apartment house as a base for her side work, bringing sailors home for some sex behind closed doors. The fact that she’s also a dancer at the nearby Kit Kat Club seems like a perfect fit.
“So they kind of say that Fritzie is like her stage name, so she goes by Fritzie Kost,” she said. “But as far as Kost is concerned, I think there are a couple different ways you can play Kost, and I basically through my auditions went with what I was seeing on the page and made my decisions purely off of that. I had not seen another production. I had not YouTubed another production. I just kind of went in with what I was looking at in front of me, and I was blessed to have a creative team that allowed me to kind of follow those instincts because from what I hear they are a tad different than the woman that came before me. And that’s not always something we get in this business, so again not wasted on me that I was able to have the freedom to kind of put my own stamp on it. So, yeah, I used to be embarrassed about telling people that I had never seen Cabaret or didn’t know much of Cabaret, wasn’t a fan of Cabaret, but at the same time, it was kind of the coolest experience to come into this most magical show not knowing anything about it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Cabaret, featuring Michelle Aravena, is now playing at the Kit Kat Club at the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
