Emma Stone has long stood as one of our ultimate on-screen girl crushes but last night the hilarious and very charismatic actress swapped the film real for a live audience as she made her debut as Sally Bowles in the stage show Cabaret, which is continuing its on-going residence on Broadway in New York.
Picking up where fellow film actress Michelle Willams left off was never going to be easy for Emma but it looks like the 26-year-old starlet of Superbad and Easy A fame held her own and then some...
The reviews of her performance have only just started to roll in but they're already singing her praises. Theatremania.com has dubbed her as 'perfectly marvellous' while The Guardian has said 'Stone delivers where it counts.' Nice work, lady.
For the musical novices amongst you, Cabaret takes you to 1931 Berlin just as the Nazis are rising to power. The main plot line of the show centres around the nightlife at the seedy 'Kit Kat Klub', and revolves around the 19-year-old English cabaret performer Sally (played by Stone) and her relationship with the young American writer Cliff Bradshaw. In a nutshell...
It's hard to imagine that Emma's chance to take the stage almost passed her by. Emma was actually in talks to play the iconic character of Sally back in march 2013 but her commitments to her Spiderman filming overlapped with her initial performances. So, she was then replaced by Michelle.
Speaking of the realisation that it would be impossible to see both commitments through til the end, Emma revealed to The New York Times: 'I’d said goodbye to the idea of ever playing Sally on Broadway, and it upset me; it really upset me, but I think it also helped me learn about having a real work-life balance, as cliché as that sounds.
She then went on to say: 'There was one day on the schedule where I would land from Tokyo in the morning and have enough time to make it to perform in that afternoon’s matinee. I realised that this schedule would turn the dream of playing Sally into a kind of nightmare. It felt like forcing something that wouldn’t fit. But I was telling myself I can do this, and everyone wanted to make it work, and it’s hard to say no when people are being so accommodating. But part of me also thought, "It’s going to kill me."
However, when the opportunity came knocking the second time round, Emma definitely wasn't going to let it pass her by.
One of Emma's fondest memories is when she took a trip to New York when she was 9-years-old with her parents and went to watch Cabaret. She explained: 'Listening to Natasha Richardson, I realised you could be an actor in a musical and not have the perfect voice I’d heard on cast recordings. I don’t have this gorgeous untouchable voice, and it was Natasha who really lit a fuse under me to try musicals and play Sally someday.'
And we're so glad Emma's finally be given the chance to make her dreams come true.
Stone will be performing at the Round House Theatre right into the New Year with her last show currently scheduled for the 1st of February 2015.
If the shopping, tourist attractions and uh-mazing restaurants wasn't enough to get you hot-footing it straight onto a plane to NYC, the idea of catching Emma in Cabaret before time runs out ought to do it...
Good work, Ms Stone!
By Maxine Eggenberger