Life is an audition

Theatre debut

As she’d be the first to tell you, Michelle Williams, a movie star with practically no experience as a singer and dancer, was not an obvious choice to play the nightclub entertainer Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

 She is making her Broadway debut in the role, at Studio 54, in the Roundabout Theater Company’s resuscitation of its legendary 1998 production.

But she got the job only after Emma Stone dropped out.

“They didn’t call it an audition,” Williams said, recalling her first meeting with the show’s co-directors, Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, who is also the choreographer.

“But that’s what it was, and I’m fine with that. Sally was never a first choice. That’s why she had to go to Berlin.”
Even smaller in person than she looks on screen, Williams, 33, does not have a big-movie-star manner.

She’s shy, earnest, thoughtful, and after being swarmed by the press following the 2008 death of Heath Ledger, with whom she had a daughter, a little wary of publicity.

“I’ve realised something about myself,” she said, talking about her decision to join the show.

“When I said I wanted to do this, not a few people in my life said: ‘Are you sure? Aren’t you going to be terrified?’

I’m not good at thinking things through. I get excited about something, and that outweighs everything else. I don’t really carry the vision down the line to see the possibilities of how it might turn out.”

She smiled and added: “I think that for my work that’s actually been an OK trait. For life, not so good.”

She had picked up a “bug” for singing and dancing, she said, while working on the movie for which she is probably best known lately, My Week with Marilyn.
 At almost the last minute, the director, Simon Curtis, decided to bookend the film with clips of Williams singing and dancing in character as Marilyn Monroe, and Williams, who had researched the character for close to a year, spent a couple of additional weeks on a crash song-and-dance course.

“It wasn’t that I felt like I had a natural gift,” she said.

“What I liked is that you can’t be in your head. You can’t sing and dance and think at the same time, and so there’s a joy to it. I don’t have enough joy in my life. Who does?
And whenever I can get more of it, that’s where I want to go. I want more of that feeling.”

After several weeks of privately rehearsing with Patrick Vaccariello, the music director for Cabaret, and Cynthia Onrubia, the associate choreographer, Williams was still worrying about bringing her singing up to an “acceptable, nonembarrassing level,” and still trying to figure out how to make the part her own.

Cumming, who considers himself possibly the greatest living expert on Sally Bowles, said that what makes the character memorable “is that she’s really vulnerable but projects this false confidence.”

But, he added, “the problem you have to get round is that she’s not the greatest talent, so you have to go with the rawness and energy.” That Sally herself isn’t so hot at being Sally might seem like an actor’s escape hatch, except that, as Wiliams pointed out, “You can’t just go out and be a general mess.” “I’m still trying to figure it out,” she went on, explaining that to research the part, she had travelled to Berlin and also visited with Don Bachardy, who used to live with Christopher Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories are the basis for Cabaret.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about her. What is her specific lack? Is it because she’s lazy? Because she’s overenthusiastic? There are a lot of possibilities. Why she falls short and how she falls short. I’m still working on that.” Linda Emond, who pays Fraulein Schneider, is a longtime friend of Williams’, said: “We’re all nervous. I still have the jitters. But Michelle is probably just more honest about it. She’s exposed in a way, and she’s willing to say, ‘I’m scared to death.’ But what I also see is that she is absolutely thrilled to be here.”

That Williams is a movie star is doubtless part of why the directors chose her.
 But despite three Oscar nominations by the time she was barely 31, she is a curious kind of star.

She has managed a major movie career without appearing in many major movies.

She earned her first Oscar nomination in Brokeback Mountain, had a smallish role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s dead wife in Shutter Island, and played opposite James Franco in Oz the Great and Powerful.
 But mostly she has made her reputation in low-budget, or even bare-budget, indie films like Blue Valentine (for which she got her second Oscar nod), Take This Waltz, Meek’s Cutoff (perhaps the scrimpiest Western ever made) and Wendy and Lucy (in which her co-star is a mixed-breed retriever) — the kinds of movies that critics love but that are strangers to the multiplex.
Looking back at her career, which included a long stint in the sudsy teenage series Dawson’s Creek, Williams said: “Some material gives back to you. The other stuff taps you out. What helped me was being in situations where you had to learn quickly how to adapt, and that’s how I feel about this.”

She recalled that, at one point, she told Emond: “They’re going to teach me to sing and dance and act on the stage, and they’re going to pay me? Whatever happens, I’m going to come out of this better than when I started. Even if I’m embarrassed, I’m going to be better.”