Interview: Jailyn Osborne of CABARET at Point Loma Playhouse

Step inside the Kit Kat Club.

For Jailyn Osborne, director, choreographer, and Artistic Director of 3Peace Studios & Point Loma Playhouse, Cabaret is more than a musical—it is an experience designed to draw audiences into its world before quietly revealing what lies beneath the surface. In this intimate, immersive production, the Kit Kat Club comes alive around the audience with live music, movement, humor, seduction, and danger.

Osborne spoke with us about transforming the space, the power of Cabaret’s story, the physical demands of the production, and what she hopes audiences carry with them after they leave the club. Performances are Friday, August 28 - Sunday, August 30  at the Point Loma Playhouse.

For those who may not know you yet, can you tell us a little about yourself and Point Loma Playhouse?

I have spent most of my life telling stories in one form or another. I’m a director, choreographer, filmmaker, writer, producer, designer, mentor, and educator, but all of those titles really come back to the same thing for me: I am interested in what happens when you put human beings in a room together and ask them to feel something.

I serve as Artistic Director of both 3Peace Studios and Point Loma Playhouse, and this season they have come together to build what I hope can become a really adventurous artistic home in San Diego. We are small, and under this new direction we are still very much in our infancy. But I also don’t believe the size of your company should determine the size of your imagination.

I want us to make theatre that takes risks. Theatre with an opinion. Theatre where movement, music, color, design, and performance are all telling the same story.

You are transforming the Kit Kat Club into an immersive production of Cabaret. What inspired you to approach this iconic musical in such an intimate way?

I started with one thought: the audience has to fall in love with the Kit Kat Club before we are allowed to break their hearts.

I didn’t want the audience safely observing these people from across the room. I wanted them implicated in the pleasure of it. So you don’t simply arrive at the theatre and watch the Kit Kat Club. You enter it.

There is live music in the room. There are bodies moving around you. There is humor and sexuality and danger and seduction. The performers acknowledge you. Choreography happens only feet away from you. The room should feel alive. The room should feel intoxicating.

I don’t want to rush to the darkness because we already know the darkness is coming. The first part has to be fun. Otherwise we haven’t earned the second.

What makes Cabaret continue to resonate with audiences today?

Because the people in Cabaret don’t know they’re living in history. That may be the thing about this musical that frightens me the most. We know what happens next. They don’t. They’re making plans for next month.

History never feels like history while you’re living through it. It feels like your rent is due. Your relationship is falling apart. You’re late for work. You’re going dancing Friday night. And somewhere beyond your immediate life, the temperature of the world is changing.

There is a question running underneath this entire production for me: how long can you keep dancing before you have to ask what the music is drowning out?

And yet I don’t think the answer is that joy is frivolous. Joy matters. Dancing matters. Love matters. Art matters. Especially when the world is frightening. The danger is when pleasure becomes permission not to look.

What has been the most exciting—or challenging—part of bringing this production to life?

This show has taken almost everything I have.

I’ve been navigating some serious health challenges while making Cabaret, and that has changed the way I think about time, bodies, art and what we are willing to spend ourselves on.

I’m a director, but I’m also a choreographer. I have always communicated physically. This time, there have been moments when my imagination has been able to move faster than my body. That has been frustrating. It has also been clarifying. We get one very short life. But if we’re lucky, the things we say with it can live much longer. I wanted to spend whatever I had on making something that mattered.

I pushed the visual language, the costumes, the color composition, the immersion and the choreography enormously. I didn’t want dancers decorating the story. I wanted their bodies carrying the argument of the story.

What do you hope audiences take away from this production?

First, I want them to have a fantastic night. I think sometimes we talk about important theatre in a way that makes it sound medicinal. Cabaret shouldn’t feel like medicine.

Come hear Kander and Ebb’s iconic score played by a live band. Come see Austyn Myers walk into the Emcee and completely own this strange, seductive world. Come watch Aarin Wilson give us a Sally who can be hilarious and infuriating and magnetic and then suddenly so emotionally naked that the room changes.

Come have a drink. Come laugh. Come be seduced. And then we’ll talk.

Ultimately, I hope people leave asking questions bigger than this production: What do we normalize because it isn’t affecting us yet? Who do we decide belongs in the room? When does silence become participation? What are we willing to risk for another human being? And when the world gives us evidence that something is changing, do we pay attention?

For someone who has never experienced a 3Peace Studios & Point Loma Playhouse production, I hope Cabaret also makes them curious about what can happen inside a small theatre. Small companies can be laboratories. We can take enormous swings. We can rethink the relationship between performer and audience. We can experiment with a room.

We’re learning. We’re evolving. And we’re willing to take real artistic risks. I want people to walk into our space and think, I didn’t know this was happening here. And then I want them to tell somebody else.

Theatre is always Extraordinary

I think artists sometimes spend so much time trying to prove that what we’re making deserves to exist that we forget how extraordinary it is that any of it exists at all. A production begins as nothing. An empty place. Some pages. An idea somebody is crazy enough to believe in. Then a musician plays the first note. A designer chooses a color. An actor takes a risk. A dancer tries something they couldn’t do three weeks ago. Someone hangs a light. Someone sews a costume. Somebody stays late. Somebody says, “What if?” And eventually hundreds of individual acts of faith become a world. Then an audience walks through the door. For two and a half hours, everybody agrees that this imaginary world is real. And then we tear it down. That’s theatre. It is temporary by design. Maybe that is why I love it so much right now. Navigating some serious health challenges has made me painfully aware that permanence was never really something any of us were promised. But temporary does not mean insignificant. A performance disappears. Its impact doesn’t have to. We get one short life. We get a finite number of rooms we will walk into, people we will love, risks we will take, and stories we will tell.

So I don’t want to spend mine making things cautiously. I want to make beautiful things. Difficult things. Joyful things. Things that make room for people who were told there wasn’t room for them. Things that scare me a little. Things that ask something of the audience. And things that might leave an echo after we’re gone.

That’s what I hope we’re building at 3Peace Studios & Point Loma Playhouse. Not just shows. Something that stays after the lights go out.

How To Get Tickets

Cabaret is playing Friday, August 28 - Sunday, August 30  at the Point Loma Playhouse at 3148 Fifth Ave, San Diego, CA 92103.  For ticket information, go to https://plplh.com/

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