Saturday’s performances of “Cabaret” at The Belle Theatre will mark Bradyn Parmelly’s final Florida show. The Kit Kat emcee is relocating to Pennsylvania.
He’ll be missed. Local theater lovers enjoyed his portrayals of Mark Cohen in “Rent,” Ren McCormack in “Footloose” and Danny Zuko in “Grease.”
His rendition of “Cabaret’s” master of ceremonies is no less memorable.
“Everybody brings their own sense of raunchiness to this part,” said Parmelly. “It's definitely something out of the ordinary as to something I've played before, you know, the leading man or the heartthrob. You don't usually get someone who gets to appear and be nasty and dirty and gritty and show that kind of gross underside of 1930s Berlin.”
Some of Parmelly’s other roles include Dr. Sanderson for Belle Theatre in “Harvey,” the Baker in “Into the Woods” at Cultural Park Theatre (2024), Conrad Birdie in “Bye Bye Birdie” (2024), the title role in “Pippin” (2023) at Cultural Park Theatre, as well as Grantaire in “Les Miserables” (2023) and Greg in “A Chorus Line” (2023) with Melody Lane Theatre and Leon Czolgosz in “Assassins” (2021) and Seymour Krelborn in “Little Shop of Horrors” (2020).
While Parmelly is moving on, Camila Guedes is moving up. She’s brilliant in the role of Sally Bowles, in which her performance is informed by research she’s done into the character.
“I've done research on the real life person that inspired Sally Bowles,” said Guedes. “Her name was Jean Ross. Jean Ross was actually not very happy with her portrayal as Sally at all because it was allegedly very different from who she was as a person. Sally doesn't really care about the world around her. So long as she's having fun and living the high life, she doesn't care about anything else. As for Jean Ross, she was very involved in politics and was actually an activist against the Nazi Party.”
Her character’s motivation comes out in the title song, “Cabaret.”
“She just finished having a fight with Cliff and she's barely holding it together,” Guedes explains. “She starts talking about her experiences back in London with Elsie, this friend that she had, and how after witnessing Elsie's death and how she always seemed so happy and above it all, the way I play Sally, she's yearning to be like that.”
She’ll be attending Valencia College online in the fall. Guedes plans on staying local and performing in more shows. As she has only been acting for roughly six years, there’s no limit to how good she will be as she gains more onstage experience.
MORE INFORMATION:
“Cabaret” is onstage at The Belle Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m.
As the Kit Kat emcee, Parmelly displays his own unique brand of “raspiness and grittiness” to the role in an effort to adapt the character to Belle Theatre’s unique take on the show’s ending scene in which all the performers are marched off to a concentration camp.
Alan Cumming’s portrayal of the Kit Kat emcee served as one of Parmelly’s inspirations.
“His emcee, to me, is the ideal emcee,” Parmelly said. “It's the perfect portrayal of that kind of mix of goofiness and flirtatiousness and fun with that nasty, mean, kind of authoritarian figure of the time. I pulled a lot from that.”
But Parmelly’s portrayal was also heavily influenced by his own historical research into the time period, the show’s performance history and the suggestions he and the rest of the cast received from castmate Cat Turner, who served as the show’s dramaturg.
“Cat plays Fraulein Kost, and actually did her college senior thesis on theater in the Third Reich,” Parmelly explained. “She has been super helpful with questions on whether this or that would be accurate. Do you think he would play it this way? Do you think they'd walk or talk or act like this during this time? She's been fabulous. She read hundreds of pages of research so she's really been an astounding help.”
For more on Cat Turner's role as dramaturg, visit "Belle Theatre taps student actor Cat Turner as 'Cabaret' dramaturg."
The cast’s immersion into the history and atmosphere prevailing in Berlin in 1933 certainly lends a more realistic feel to The Belle’s production of the timeless musical.
“The audience isn’t just coming in and just seeing a bunch of actors performing a show,” Parmelly amplified. “They’re actually getting a real story and with a story like this, where there is so much historical background and context that needs to be interpreted, I think you definitely need to dig in a little bit more than just like a surface level dramaturgy, for sure.”
That’s particularly pertinent when it comes to the contrast between the sexual and moral freedom that takes place within the Kit Kat Klub and the neo-morality and rejection of moral and artistic “degeneracy” espoused by Hitler and Nazi party as he was ascending to power after becoming Chancellor.
During rehearsals, the Kit Kat girls and boys typically rehearsed separately from the rest of the cast. In Parmelly’s estimation, that’s resulted in heightening the disparity between what happens in and outside of the Kit Kat Klub.
“During the rehearsal process, the Kit Kat performers were in one room dancing while the other cast members were onstage blocking the rest of the show or doing things like that,” said Parmelly. “We kind of existed in different universes while rehearsing the show and I think it kind of works best that way because the Kit Kat Klub is so disconnected from the outside world. They're so far away from the absolute atrocities happening around them.”
Parmelly has enjoyed working with castmate Camila Guedes. He found the relationship between the emcee and Sally Bowles to be especially emblematic of the musical’s various themes.
“They've developed their own special relationship after working together for so many years,” said Parmelly. “He refuses to introduce her as anything other than The Toast of Mayfair Fraulein Sally Bowles. He has a lot of respect for Sally, but he knows she's expendable. They all are. The emcee is the only one who's really set. He always has another show to come back to. But the Kit Kat girls and boys, who knows? Outside the club they could be involved in terrible domestic relationships or selling themselves on the street or engaged in substance abuse or all the plentiful things that were happening during this time period. And while Sally is a bit afraid of the emcee, he's worried if he loses Sally, he may lose the star of his show.”
While the scantily clad chorus of Kit Kat girls and boys and the club’s seedy, hyper-sexualized emcee get most of the attention, “Cabaret” remains an unvarnished treatment of authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and abortion set to the memorable music and disturbing lyrics of John Kander and Fred Ebb.
“The music is so much fun to sing,” said Parmelly. “It's fun to dance. It kind of lives in your brain like an earworm. It's astounding. It's gorgeous. It's some of the most fun music I've gotten to do, and that's really saying something when you consider I’ve done ‘A Chorus Line,’ ‘Footloose’ and ‘Something Rotten.’ But I get to bring in a little bit more grit and rawness and vulnerability to a lot of these songs that I haven't been able to display before.”
Camila Guedes also appreciates the emotional range incorporated into the Kander and Ebb music and lyrics. She also likes the contrast from one number to the next.
“In ‘Cabaret,’ I scream a lot of it because Sally is basically having a meltdown on stage. She has been trying to hold it together, trying to stay above it all, stay like Elsie. But she can't.”
By comparison, “Maybe This Time” reveals Sally’s vulnerability and surprise that someone really wants to take care of her.
“To set the scene, Sally has just revealed to Cliff that she's pregnant.” Guedes pointed out. “She's about to leave because she assumes that Cliff is not going to want to be with her anymore. But he tells her it's fine, that he wants to stay with her, stay by her side and that they’re going to work it out. That's something very new for Sally. Sally is used to being disposable and just bouncing back and forth between different people, and for once in her life, she finds herself in a meaningful bond.”
Although she has only been acting since eighth grade, Guedes cannot imagine a life without acting.
“I really like immersing myself in a story and getting to know different characters and bring them to life,” Guedes said. “It just does it for me. I get up every morning and I'm like, oh my god, I get to go sing. It just makes me really happy.”
Some of Guedes' recent shows include “In Pieces” at The Belle, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” at Cultural Park Theatre, a high school production of “Beauty and the Beast,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Grease” and “Legally Blonde.”
“When it comes to theater, I hope to like keep performing for as long as I can, because it is something that honestly just brings me a lot of joy.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
