Just weeks after the national tour of “Kinky Boots” played the Bushnell, here’s the other gay-tolerance musical with book by Harvey Fierstein based on a European comedy. “La Cage Aux Folles,” with its jaunty score and snappy dialogue, is getting a colorful, vibrant and wonderfully emotional revival at the Goodspeed Opera House through Sept. 10.
Both “Kinky Boots” and “La Cage” feature drag-queen chorines and songs about finding oneself and maintaining one’s ideals. But where “Kinky Boots” (set in a shoe factory in a small British village) speaks to contemporary issues of sexual identity, bullying and social change, “La Cage Aux Folles” (set in a popular drag club in St. Tropez, France) has a more old-school, cut-and-dried clash-of-cultures approach to gay/straight relations.
“La Cage Aux Folles” is a grand, boisterous show, all the grander for being done at the intimate Goodspeed, where the actors can address the audience and you sense the sort of real-life connection you get in nightclubs. This “La Cage” dazzles not with glitter and glamour but humanity.
“La Cage Aux Folles” has a long history of success. It was originally a non-musical French play by Jean Poiret that premiered in 1973 and ran for over 1,800 performances. In 1978 the play was turned into a movie (co-written and directed by Edouard Molinaro), which became the top-grossing foreign film of its time. Fierstein & Herman’s musicalization of the play, which opened on Broadway in 1983, won six Tony Awards. And Mike Nichols’ 1996 American remake of the “La Cage Aux Folles” film, retitled “The Birdcage” and featuring songs by Stephen Sondheim, was both a critical and commercial hit.
The musical version is wonderfully old-fashioned. Its plot is not that far afield from “You Can’t Take It With You”— an unconventional family (in this case Georges, the owner of a French nightclub married to the club’s drag diva Albin) who must make themselves “presentable” for potential in-laws. The homosexual couple’s heterosexual son has fallen in love with a young woman whose politician father publicly decries gay culture as “perverted” and has sworn to shut down drag clubs such as the titular La Cage Aux Folles. The son insists that his neglectful and non-present biological mother be invited to a dinner party along with the fiancee’s parents — and that Albin not be there at all.
There are lots of impassioned speeches about love and understanding. There’s also a dizzying stream of snippy one-liners:
“If he loved me, he’d vacuum.”
“Our baby is getting married; where did we go wrong?”
Some of the plot twists and stereotypical characters may be a bit too old-fashioned for modern tastes. There’s something disconcerting about seeing a gay-themed show that’s based on constant deceptions, and where a proud, out gay man’s flashy wardrobe and living-room decor are packed up and literally hidden in a closet so that he won’t embarrass his son’s guests. There’s a discussion about how “In the minds of the masses, a lush is more presentable than a fruit.”
There’s a special intimacy to the Goodspeed’s “La Cage.” In other productions, the drag-club chorus of Les Cagelles are a show in themselves — an elaborate showcase for drag culture at its best. Here, the dancers are more supporting players and comic relief in an already highly comical show. As often happens at the Goodspeed, the chorus and supporting cast have been scaled down so the big production numbers can better fit the theater’s stage. Instead of a dozen drag chorus girls (“Les Cagelles”), there are seven. (For those with a score card, that means no Monique, Paulette, Dermah, Lo Singh, Odette or Angelique, though some of their lines have been given to the existing Phaedra, Chantal, Mercedes, Nicolette, Hanna, Clo-Clo and Bitelle). You share the exhaustion of that strong-limbed septet kicking up their high heels over and over again in a succession of dance routines. The club routines may not be as sensational as they could be, but the staginess only heightens the revealing glimpses of what it’s like backstage at such shows. The first act “ends with Albin/Zaza being given an unsettling, insulting demand by his loved ones, just before he goes onstage. The resulting number, “I Am What I Am,” is right up there with “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy” or “Midnight Radio” from “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” as a song of pathos and empowerment.
What this “La Cage Aux Folles” may lack in excess and spangling glamour it makes up for with heart and soul. As Georges and Albin (aka Zaza), the dashing James Lloyd Reynolds (the 2004 Yale School of Drama grad who was in “These Paper Bullets” at Yale Rep in 2014 and has previously been at Goodspeed in “42nd Street” and “Mame”) and the hysterically funny Jamison Stern (who performed Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy” in Ohio and has a long regional theater and Broadway tour resume) are a loving, believable couple. Both have chances to chat amiably with audience members; on opening night Stern nearly upbraided one attendee with “Are you in the show? No? Then let me do the talking.”
Reynolds’ Georges is a handsome, well-composed, unflappable straight man (in the theatrical sense, not the sexual one), while Stern’s Albin is an instantly adorable mix of coquettishness and volatile emotional freak-outs. The roles of Georges and Albin are often played by actors in their 60s (the original Broadway stars were Gene Barry and George Hearn, and the most recent Broadway revival starred Kelsey Grammer and Douglas Hodge), but Reynolds and Stern are in their 40s and bring a vitality and prime-of-life presence to George and Albin.
The story of this well-matched pair contending with the expectations of their son and the bigotries of the outside world (personified by the steely-eyed Mark Zimmerman as the imperious prig Edouard Dindon) is staged sharply and cleanly by Rob Ruggiero, whose mastery of the Goodspeed stage has been well-proven through his productions of “Carousel,” “Showboat” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” The show has the crisp appeal of a picture book, and the high-definition photo backdrop of St. Tropez in springtime only enhances that feeling. This “La Cage Aux Folles,” as laugh-out-loud funny and as exquisitely sung as it is, is most notable for its dramatic flair and its heartbreaking warmth.
LA CAGE AUX FOLLES has been extended through Sept. 10. The show’s running time is two and three-quarters hours, with an intermission. The Goodspeed Opera House is at 6 Main St. in East Haddam. More information can be found at (860) 873-8668 or goodspeed.org.
