Life's a Cabaret

Gordon Barr, Evening Chronicle

IT’S been a busy time for actress Samantha Barks.

Having made the final three on the BBC’s search for Nancy in Oliver! in I’d Do Anything, she’s been touring the country in her first professional theatrical production.

Cabaret arrives at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle, on Monday next week for a six-night run and for Samantha, life really is something of a cabaret at present.

She takes on the role of Sally Bowles, made famous by Liza Minnelli and is loving every minute of it.

"So much has happened in a year. It’s just been the best year ever really," she says. "It’s been a bit of a whirlwind."

Described as one of the defining musicals of the post war era, Cabaret is set in 1930s Berlin as the rise of Nazism savagely collides with the ‘divine decadence’ of the Weimar Republic.

At the heart of the story is a young Englishwoman Sally Bowles, a cocaine-fuelled performer at the notorious Kit Kat Klub, recklessly determined to extract every destructive pleasure from life no matter what.

The Kit Kat Klub’s enigmatic, all-seeing Emcee tells the story of Sally and her friends, Cliff Bradshaw, a young gay writer from the USA, the elderly Frau Schneider and her new found love Herr Schultz, as their dreams for the future crash into the Nazi machine.

It is packed with some of musical theatre’s most thrilling songs, including Cabaret, Mein Herr, Maybe This Time, The Money Song, all brassily accompanied by an edgy, on- stage band.

Having moved from the Isle of Man to London at the age of 16, Samantha trained at the Arts Educational School for a year before entering the competition to find the next Nancy. "Taking part in I’d Do Anything was great exposure and a great experience. I learned a lot from the show," she says.

"It’s surreal. You can’t see the seven million people who are watching you every night, it’s just a camera lens. So it is strange to think it is going to so many people.

"It was a really big learning curve to learn to work with cameras. As a performer you just have to go for everything as it is a hard business.

"So if you see an opportunity out there you have just got to grab it with both hands.

"I may not have won the role of Nancy but I am performing on stage in one of the biggest musicals there is.

"I have nothing to complain about."

Cabaret is at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle, from July 6 to 11.