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Don't tell mama, but Lea Thompson plays up the sexy side of Sally Bowles
Sunday, May 14, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Huh? Hello. "
It isn't the perky, sunshiny voice I've heard a hundred times on "Caroline in the City" and in those "Back to the Future" films. This voice is deeper and raspy, as if it's creeping from the maw of a hotel ashtray. Maybe I've dialed the wrong number. I tell her that I'm looking for Lea Thompson.
"Uh huh, this is me," she says, drawing the last word into a long yawn that ends with a few morning sniffles. I can almost hear the muscles unwinding as she stretches her arms back. "Oh! The interview. I'm sorry. What time is it?"
Both of us are caught off guard. She's forgotten about her scheduled interview previewing her provocative leading role in the American tour of "Cabaret." I suddenly realize that I'm alone in bed -- telephonically, anyway -- with that cute little beach bunny from "Jaws 3-D." She stifles a yawn, only a whisper away, and assures me that this really is a good time. I know that it isn't, but this is the only chance I'll ever have to share a little pillow talk with her. So I ask her a sexy question first, before she can wipe the sleep from her eyes.
"Oh yes," she says, chuckling deeply and sexily, "this definitely is a different kind of part than most people are used to seeing me in. It's a wild production. Sally Bowles is kind of a trollop, and [directors Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall] use the songs and the set and costumes to be very provocative. The girls all have torn stockings and bruises, and the makeup is kind of wild. I think he's trying to be trashy, to show the bottom of Berlin in that time before Hitler came to power -- the decadence, the desperation of these people."
Nothing spoils the mood quicker than the mention of Hitler, and by now I'm sure she's sitting up and fastening the top buttons of her nightgown. But Thompson seems intent on exploring the sexuality of her "Cabaret" role, maybe to prepare Pittsburgh audiences for what she's bringing to Heinz Hall.
"Even if most people think of me as Caroline," she says, "they also saw me in 'Back to the Future' in a wild good-girl part, a girl in love with her son. And in 'Caroline' I had a lot of" -- she hesitates, searching for a synonym for sexual -- "a lot of different things to do. My personality is really such that I like people. I like the audience. I like being in front of people, and I use that in this character.
"But this character is a drunk and she snorts coke and she's a little promiscuous. I feel the audience wants to like her, but she keeps doing these things that make her unlikable."
The racist language and bisexual activities of "Cabaret's" characters drew censorship and protests when it opened on Broadway and toured in the 1960s. Though still provocative, it was cleaned up a bit in the '70s when Bob Fosse made the film version with Liza Minnelli as trashy Sally Bowles. Mendes has returned the dark portrait of declining morality to its rightful place in the gutter. It's been back on the road for about a year.
A month ago, Thompson replaced Joely Fisher in the leading role. It may be a sign of the times that even in the conservative theaters of middle America, this sexually charged version of "Cabaret" is generating good reviews. And the crowds lining up outside are carrying tickets, not picket signs.
"They're [advertising] that it's for mature audiences," says Thompson. "I think that's the metaphor they're trying to use for 'no young children,' like a PG-13 movie. Sam is definitely using my character as a metaphor for the innocence that's completely lost and destroyed in Berlin. This Berlin is very heavy into Hitler and what happened to the Jewish people and how their friends and neighbors turned against them. My character isn't political and tries to not face any of it, but it swallows them all up in the end."
As one of the female cabaret performers in the raunchy Kit Kat Club, Thompson's character does what she calls "some wild numbers," from "Don't Tell Mama," in which she plays a bad little girl, to the chain-smoking floozy in "Mein Herr."
"I can feel the audience watching," she says. "I know they haven't seen me like this before. The really interesting part is that [Sally] keeps doing things that are confusing, that are not exactly sympathetic. I have to really like my characters, so with Sally I kind of see her as a street urchin trying to survive the only way she knows how. She acts sexy and thought-provoking and lulls you into this feeling that you're hip and understand it all -- until the end, where it packs a punch."
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