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During a pivotal moment of Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club on Broadway, country virtuoso Orville Peck makes a bold choice. And no, it has nothing to do with his mask. 
It has to do with “If You Could See Her,” a critical song for his impish, unreliable narrator, the Emcee. After an entire act of vaudevillian, entertaining antics from Peck’s host-with-the-most, “If You Could See Her” seems like another such farce at the start of Act II; after all, he’s dressed as a clown and singing a love song to a gorilla. They dance, he taunts the ape with a banana, and he asks the audience why the world cannot seem to “leben und leben lassen” — live and let live — when it comes to his relationship. “If you could see her through my eyes,” he sings, before twisting the knife, “she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”

In other iterations of this production, the Emcee sings this line almost as a pitying lament, or as a whisper, like he’s letting the audience in on a secret. But Peck holds nothing back in his version. There is no softened sentiment in his voice, only vitriol; he practically spits out the word “Jewish” as though it were a slur. As he skips around the stage to the song’s jaunty outro, he mimes a handgun with his fingers, and on the song’s final musical sting, fires it into the gorilla’s head. 

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“My job is to win the audience over for most of the first act, and to make them feel like this is a comedy and it’s light and to have a laugh,” Peck tells Billboard. “It’s also then my job to betray you.”

Peck takes that job very seriously throughout his performance in Cabaret, and manages to wring incredible pathos out of the iconic character. Balancing the Emcee’s whimsical exterior with a malevolent darkness lurking underneath throughout the show, Peck utterly transforms from his well-established stage persona into something entirely new.

In order to properly assist that transformation, Peck knew from the get-go that he wouldn’t wear his signature mask during the production. After years of obscuring his face, Peck instead greets the audience face-to-face in Cabaret. “Whether I would wear the mask or not was never a question,” he admits. “The real trepidation came when the offer came in, and I knew I had the opportunity to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to doing this. I definitely had a lot of thinking to do. I asked the people in my life if this was the right thing to do, and the right moment for it. But it became an easy ‘yes.’”

The reason that “yes” was so easy is because Peck cites Cabaret as “one of my favorite musicals,” and the Emcee as “the role I’ve wanted to play since I can remember.” For the uninitiated, the show — which made its original Broadway debut all the way back in 1966 and was adapted into the 1972 film of the same name — follows the stories of multiple characters living at the end of Weimar Germany, embracing the hedonistic, impoverished lifestyles of Berlin while ignoring the Nazi party’s rise to power.

Orville Peck in Cabaret

Gina Manning

Where other roles in the show — like the vivacious cabaret star Sally Bowles (played in this production by Tony nominee Eva Nobelezada) — interact primarily with one another, the Emcee is most interested in speaking directly to the audience. Most of his time on the stage is spent encouraging those watching to “leave your troubles outside” while slowly luring you in to the lurid lifestyles of his seedy nightclub. Eventually, he holds a mirror up to your complicity; while you were having fun at the Kit Kat Club, the Nazis took over.

“It’s a role that’s not necessarily fleshed out in the script; there’s very little dialogue, it’s a very open-ended character,” Peck explains. “You kind of have to color outside the lines and make decisions for yourself.”

When it came time for Peck to find his version of the Emcee, he was well equipped for the task — a graduate of the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (LAMDA), Peck dove headfirst into building an iteration of the character that made the most sense coming from him. “My Emcee has a sort of grit, and an almost punk attitude to him that I think is probably from that part of my life,” he explains, referencing his early career as a drummer in a punk band. “I draw on a lot of themes of what it’s like to be queer, or to grow up with internalized issues, with fears, with questions of feeling empowered in society.”

While the acting aspect of the role wasn’t an adjustment for Peck, the Broadway schedule has been — performing in eight shows every week, the singer says it took two weeks for him to properly adjust to the reality of this style of performance. “It’s a different thing being 37 and coming back into this medium and working with these incredible performers who’ve devoted their lives to this type of performance,” he says with a laugh. “It’s sort of like running a marathon with people who have been training for years and years, and I’m trying to compete at the same level.”

What he found, though, is that his career as a headlining country performer actually provided benefits of its own for his new gig. Where other Broadway newcomers might blanch at the sheer amount of stage time the Emcee has (he performs in half of the show’s songs and remains on stage even longer), Peck is used to the toll of live performance. “In my regular live show, I am kind of carrying and leading the show for sometimes two hours straight, so that experience actually came in handy for this,” he says.

The other main challenge for his Broadway debut came from his voice — Peck garnered a reputation for his smooth baritone as a country star, with a rich chest voice that has drawn comparisons to the likes of Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. Yet the character of the Emcee is a bright tenor with an airy falsetto, who very rarely dips into the low-end of his range, presenting a challenge for Peck.

“It took a lot of work. But I wanted to do it, because I really wanted to disappear into this role,” he says. “I didn’t want people to come, and as soon as I started singing, be like, ‘Oh, well, there’s Orville Peck crooning as usual.’ So I worked really hard with a vocal coach [Chris York] at the characterization of different placement for where I sing and how I sing.”

With a new look, a honed voice and a character built from the ground up, Peck joined the cast on March 31 to rave reviews from audiences. His interpretation of the role brings a far more sinister energy than the more sexually charged version of the part by his predecessor Adam Lambert, or the almost-alien portrayal by Eddie Redmayne. And that was the point: “I wanted to build this character my own way, very differently from Eddie and Adam,” he says. “I’m having the best time of my life.”

Part of why Peck felt so strongly about being a part of this production has to do with the timing. With the show telling a cautionary tale about the perils of ignorance in the face of fascism, Peck cannot help but draw a direct parallel to our current political situation. As Donald Trump and his administration continue to push the limits of presidential power, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club feels more relevant than ever.

“Yeah, it’s frightening, and it’s very much the elephant in the room for us,” Peck says. “It’s depressing, of course, but I also think I’m really grateful that this show is running during a time like this — if even one person leaves that theater with a light bulb having gone off, or feeling any more compassion or empathy for what is going on for people right now, then that is all I can ask for.”

Which brings us back to “If You Could See Her” — while audiences are currently stunned into silence after Peck’s hostile performance, just a few months ago, they were having a very different reaction: laughter. Lambert recounted a story from his run during an appearance on The View, saying he confronted an audience member who laughed when he sang his line about the gorilla being Jewish. “No, this isn’t comedy,” Lambert told the audience member. “Pay attention.”

Joel Grey, who originated the role in 1966 and in the 1972 film, even wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, urging audiences to heed the show’s warning. “History is giving us another chance to confront the forces that Cabaret warned us about,” he wrote. “The question is: Will we listen this time, or will we keep laughing until the music stops?

Peck has yet to experience laughter during his “If You Could See Her,” but says he’s had a few surprising moments in the part. In one recent show, during his rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” — a fake German folk song that quickly devolves into a Nazi anthem — he noticed a few members of the audience “cheering” as he raised his arm into a Nazi salute. “I think may have just been very big fans of mine who were excited that I was singing a really big note,” he says.

But even if those audience members weren’t just fans of his, Peck says he wants to create space for people to experience the feeling of discomfort that Cabaret is designed to create. “I don’t know what drives that laughter or that cheering, necessarily, but I do know that I have been in situations in my life where I have laughed at something that I shouldn’t have because I was uncomfortable,” he says. “The impact of these moments within the show are supposed to make people uncomfortable, they are supposed to pull the rug out from under you.”

He pauses for a moment, considering his next words carefully. “The idea is, shortly after that, they might go, ‘Oh, s–t. We probably shouldn’t have been cheering,’” he says. “The hope is we’re also enlightening, and confronting, and providing something more than just a musical.”