Marisha Wallace didn’t leave the United States over politics. She left for a role — a last-minute gig in London in late 2016, covering for an ailing actor in Casey Nicholaw’s West End production of “Dreamgirls.”
Effie White was the part, and Wallace smashed it. Then the jobs kept coming. So she stayed, a North Carolinian flourishing there as she had not flourished in New York. In London she built herself a life, and gathered accolades for her work — a couple of Olivier Award nominations, and a pile of reviews peppered with exultations like “sensational as always” and “continues to dominate every musical she’s in.”
Early this year, she starred in Rebecca Frecknall’s “Cabaret” in the West End, playing the nightclub singer Sally Bowles opposite Billy Porter as the Emcee. During the run, she acquired her British citizenship — just as a record number of her fellow Americans were looking toward the United Kingdom as an alternative to the United States under President Trump.
“People call me literally all the time: ‘How did you do it?’” Wallace, who is 39, said the other afternoon in her soft Southern lilt. She has sent so many people to her immigration lawyer that he finally told her he couldn’t do free consultations anymore. “He’s like, booked to the hilt,” she said.
So is Wallace, who has brought her Sally Bowles to Broadway, where she and Porter are headlining the final months of Frecknall’s staging of “Cabaret” at the August Wilson Theater. I had wanted to talk with Wallace even before I saw her in it; a couple of years ago, she stunned me with her Miss Adelaide in Nicholas Hytner’s “Guys and Dolls” at the Bridge Theater in London.
Her Sally knocked me sideways, though, and not only because of Wallace’s thrillingly powerful voice, which has a habit of bringing the house down, and did that night. Until I saw her interpretation of the character, I had never really believed Sally, an English artist living a messy life in Weimar Berlin amid the rise of the Nazis. I had always found her annoying, never liked her, let alone loved her.
“Everybody says that,” Wallace said with a little laugh, when I mentioned my antipathy over a breakfasty kind of lunch at a diner near the August Wilson, its menu full of the American cooking she has missed.
Yet Wallace draws the character with extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity. This Sally is a lot, no question; she is also magnificent, funny, tender. For the first time, I didn’t wonder why Clifford Bradshaw, a novelist she barely knows, lets her stay when she shows up at his room with her whole life in her luggage.
“That’s my favorite part,” Wallace said, and laughed again.
It’s also something of an echo of what she did, when she arrived flustered on the doorstep of a new country and was welcomed — in her case, effusively.
As Frecknall said by phone, “Within quite a small amount of time really, just in a few years, she has really solidified this space for herself where she’s become this sort of musical theater royalty in London.”
Though Nicholaw tapped Wallace for “Dreamgirls” there, he takes none of the credit for her subsequent blossoming.
“She really worked her butt off to get the stardom that she has right now,” he said. “There’s a hunger that happens in certain people. And I believe that she has that. I know I did when I was growing up — a hunger to succeed or to do the thing you love or, you know, become someone.”
Like Sally, Wallace was never going to lead an ordinary life. Her new album of show tunes, “Live in London,” recorded at a concert in March and released this month, suggests as much with its opening song: “Some People,” from “Gypsy” — Momma Rose’s refusal to be one of the “humdrum people.”
Wallace, who grew up on a hog farm in Goldsboro, N.C., opts for daring over dull. When the producers of the British reality TV show “Celebrity Big Brother” invited her to be on last year’s iteration, she said yes, even though her partner warned her that it would ruin her career.
“I love doing things that no one would ever expect me to do,” she said.
That includes playing Sally, an idea she suggested to Frecknall’s production. After she was cast, Wallace said, she called Porter, whom she has known for years, and coaxed him into joining her. (He bowed out of giving an interview for this article because of illness, a publicist said.)
Sally, the Emcee and Clifford, played by Calvin Leon Smith, are all Black in the current Broadway cast, which makes sense to Wallace, historically. She imagines Sally as listening to Josephine Baker, an American who famously acquired French citizenship in the 1930s. And when Sally sings, you can hear the gospel music that’s been in Wallace’s bones since childhood.
“You hear gospel, you hear jazz, you hear blues, you hear musical theater,” she said. “And jazz was the biggest genre of music in the 1930s, when this was all taking place. How are you going to tell me there were no Black people in cabarets singing jazz music in Berlin? There’s no way.”
Constricting expectations were part of Wallace’s frustration with New York before she left.
Her résumé includes an ensemble role in Nicholaw and Trey Parker’s national touring production of “The Book of Mormon,” in 2012, and she made her Broadway debut in the ensemble of Nicholaw’s “Aladdin,” in 2014. Her last job before “Dreamgirls” was also on Broadway, in the ensemble of the 2015 musical comedy “Something Rotten!,” another Nicholaw production.
Her standout moment there was as an egg who bursts defiantly into song, Effie White-style: “And I am telling you, I’m not going to be an omelet, oh no no no no” — and then Brian d’Arcy James, the show’s star, would whack her with a frying pan.
The bit popped. But for someone with Wallace’s ambitions, Broadway just was not offering roles to match.
“Here, especially at that time, for a Black woman it was so limited: what you were allowed to do, what they thought of you to do,” she said. “I was curvy. Curvy with a big voice, you’re going to always be the funny sidekick.”
It’s not that she’s overly romantic about London theater, though, or oblivious to the existence of racism in Britain.
“Of course they have that,” Wallace said. “What they didn’t have was these bars put on me personally. It was something I had never experienced, where I was not just Marisha the Black actress.”
And because her representatives didn’t try to rein in her sense of her own potential, she pursued roles like Ado Annie in the London transfer of Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” (for which she received her first Olivier nomination, in 2023) and Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls” (her second, in 2024).
“There’s no conversation of, ‘Well, you can’t play that. You’re Black.’ Or ‘You’re not the right size,’” she said. “There was never any pushback. So I felt like I could really practice my art without resistance. And when you can practice your art without resistance, you can become a beast. Like, you can really know yourself. I think what people are seeing of me now as Sally is someone who’s been allowed to stretch every muscle and to use every muscle that they have instead of being boxed in.”
They are also seeing someone who is bold enough to take advantage of opportunities when they strike, as she did last year when she was performing in a holiday pantomime and Ian McKellen was a guest star.
“I asked him what was his advice for me playing Sally Bowles, and he was like, ‘Well, you have to know it’s your story,’” she said. “‘Also you have to figure out something that you can’t do.’ He’s like, ‘Judi Dench, she couldn’t sing, so that was the one thing she couldn’t do. What is the one thing you couldn’t do?’ And the one thing I couldn’t do was be white. I was like, ‘Wow, and that’s my plight.’”
Sally’s plight, that is, as a Black woman in Berlin in that era, with her affected upper-crust speech and longing to fit in.
“That’s why she has this accent,” Wallace said. “That’s why she’s made herself palatable. This is why she has put all this on: to protect, to survive, to make her less abrasive. But we do this as Black women — as women — in our day-to-day lives.”
In a two-hour interview, which Wallace started and ended with hugs, the one thing that made her tear up was my asking why she had sought British citizenship.
“They took me in when I felt like New York didn’t even want me,” said Wallace, now a dual citizen. Her voice thickened with emotion, but she continued: “They saw me for who I was. I didn’t have to change anything about myself; I didn’t have to be anybody else.”
In North Carolina, she had never felt like she fit in. New York, the same. Britain, she said, “was the first place I ever felt like I belonged somewhere, and they understood me.”
And so she made it permanent.
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