La Cage Aux Folles

BON SOIR!! Welcome to the pride of St Tropez, the envy of the cabaret world, the jewel of the Riviera…..

The legendary musical arrives at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 23rd November in its first major London revival. With a brilliant score by Jerry Herman (composer and lyricist of Mack and Mabel, Hello, Dolly! and Mame), a witty and moving script by Harvey Fierstein (author of Torch Song Trilogy) and a newly conceived production by director Terry Johnson (author and director of Piano/Forte, The Graduate and Hysteria), this promises to be the musical event of the season.

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Reviews:

Exclusive backstage photos

Pictures of Photocalls and curtain calls

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The Menier Chocolate Factory, 27th November 2007 - 8th March 2008, London

Performances Times: Evening Tues – Sat @ 8pm, Matinees Sat & Sun @ 3.30pm (Additional matinee shows on Thursday 20th & Thursday 27th December)

To book via telephone call: 0207 9077060 (from the UK)

Seat prices are as follows:

  1. Standard £25 Meal Deal £32.50 – 2 courses pre show plus ticket
  2. Concessions £18 (proof required – limited availability per show)
  3. Groups 10+ £20 – can only be booked via telephone – 020 79077060 (no fee)

The Menier Chocolate Factory Official Website.

La Cage wasn't and isn't just another gay musical produced in 1983 it was considered very risky as it was the early years of the Aids epidemic. But the creative team, all gay men, felt that such a show was the tonic needed by those suffering from the illness and to combat the overt homophobia that had surfaced in some quarters due to the threat posed by the epidemic. Although gay rights and awareness has come far, homophobia still exists and unfortunatelty Aids is on the increase even in parts of the West, due to Governments becoming complacent and reducing awareness and education projects. But forget the gay imagery because what stands out is that this is a wonderful romantic musical about the loving releationship between to two main leads.

La Cage Logo 2

Cast:

Synopsis:

Georges and his lover Albin, who stars as Zaza at their St. Tropez drag nightclub, "La Cage aux Folles," have lived happily together for many years. Their apartment is also home to their black "maid" Jacob. Georges' son Jean-Michel (the offspring of a confused, youthful liaison with a woman named Sybil) arrives with the news that he is engaged to Anne Dindon. Unfortunately, her father is head of the "Tradition, Family and Morality Party," whose stated goal is to close the local drag clubs. Anne's parents want to meet their daughter's future in-laws. Jean-Michel has lied to his fiancée, describing Georges as a retired diplomat. Jean-Michel pleads with Albin to absent himself (and his flamboyantly gay behaviors) for the visit and for Georges to redecorate the apartment in a more subdued fashion. He will invite Sybil, who has barely been involved with him since his birth to dinner in Albin's stead. Albin's feelings are hurt, he has been a good "mother". He departs in a huff.

The next morning, Georges suggests to Albin that he dress up as macho "Uncle Al". Back at the chastely redesigned apartment, Georges receives a telegram that Jean-Michel's mother Sybil is not coming, and Anne's parents arrive. Hoping to save the day, Albin appears as Jean-Michel's buxom, forty-year-old mother. The nervous Jacob burns the dinner, so a trip to a local restaurant, Chez Jacqueline, belonging to an old friend of Albin and Georges, is quickly arranged. No one has briefed Jacqueline on the situation, and she asks Albin for a song. As Zaza, Albin yields to the frenzy of performance tears off his wig at the song's climax, revealing his true identity.

Back at the apartment, the Dindons plead with their daughter to abandon her fiancé. But she is in love with Jean-Michel and refuses to leave him. Jean-Michel, deeply ashamed of the way he has treated Albin, asks his forgiveness (which is, of course, lovingly granted). The Dindons prepare to depart, but their way is blocked by Jacqueline, who has arrived with the press, ready to photograph these notorious anti-homosexual activists with Zaza. Georges and Albin have a proposal: If Anne and Jean-Michel may marry (and really, the Dindons have no choice in that matter), George will help the Dindons escape through La Cage aux Folles next door. The Dindons do so, dressed in drag as members of the nightclub's revue, and all ends well.

Song List:

La Cage Aux Folles Logo

Act I

Act II

Click on link to listen to samples of audio files from original cast cd.

Articles:

Fock and Awe

Panto dames and Michael Ball in Hairspray may make cross-dressing on stage seem common, but it takes more than a frock to be a successful drag queen. As a new revival of La Cage aux Folles and the upcoming transfer of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, celebrate the art of drag, Roger Foss looks at the men behind the mascara.

Excerpt from above article, by Roger Foss, What's On Stage Magazine, December 2007.

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But the Saint Tropez drag club setting for the New Menier Chocolate Factory production of the Jerry Herman-Harvey Feinstein musical La Cage aux Folles goes back to drag basics. When middle-aged drag queen Albin (played by Douglas Hodge) dabs on a little more mascara while singing about feeling special in feathers and bugle beads, he emerges as 'ZaZa' to perform in a far less extravagant club than in the original 1978 film's Las Vegas-style night spot, of in the original Broadway and London productions of the musical. If this La Cage is more like crock 'n' roll joints such as Blackpool's Funny Girls show-bar, or the network of gay clubs where today's drag queen boom is led by clowns in gowns such as Titti La Camp, Lola Lasagne, Kandi Kane and Dave Lynn, then Herman says he's "so thrilled".

"That's exactly what Harvey and I always wanted to do with the show - set it in a smaller, grittier drag club. It's always been so vast that the Ziegfeld Follies could have performed there. We were once watching La Cage and all that white chiffon and damask and I whispered to Harvey, "Gave you ever been to a drag club in Saint Tropez?" He whispered back, "No, but I'm sure it's not like this."

Relocated to the outskirts of Saint Tropez, Terry Johnson's production probably owes more to the outskirts world of Lily savage performing on the bar at the Vauxhall Tavern in Camberwell, and may well be recognisable to glitzy Sydney drag queens Mitzi, Felicia and Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (the stage musical version, already a hit in Australia, is due to open in London in late 2008), or even edgy New York dragsters Noxeema, Vida an Chi-Chi in the 1995 Hollywood movie To Waong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.

The man responsible for creating ZaZa's new drag queen "look" at the Menier, is wit and make-up maestro Richard Mawbey, who has worked for may years with La Rue, Bailey and Dame Edna and, most recently, masterminded Michael Ball's Edna Turnblad transformation in Hairspray at he Shaftesbury Theatre. Mawbey also collaborated with legendary American hair and make-up designer Ted Azar in the original London production of La Cage, starring Broadway's George Hearn as Albin.

"Unlike the vast London Palladium stage, we're working in a small space at the Menier, so I have to be careful that make-um doesn't look too terrifying in close-up. After visiting drag clubs himself, Douglas (Hodge) felt that, like so many drag queens, Albin's stage persona would be influenced by iconic female performers such as Marilyn Monroe or Tina Turner. So we've gone in that direction. "I Am what I Am' then becomes Albin's Judy Garland moment."

As for Albin's farcical attempt to disguise himself as "mother" when his lover's son brings home his fiancée's ultra-conservative parents to meet them, "that's always been done in a rather cod drag way," says Mawbey. "This time it's Albin trying to look as wonderful as he possibly can. I thought, why not give him a Catherine Deneuve image? It's just what a French drag queen in a little club on the edge of Saint Tropez might have thought of as glamour personified."

Apart from girdling his rear into a frock, one of the biggest challenges facing Hodge, Mawbey reminds me, is the 'A Little More Mascara' scene, where Albin sits in front of a mirror and transforms himself from unhappy man to glamour queen ("'Cause when I feel glamorous, elegant, beautiful, the world that I'm looking at's beautiful too"). "It needs lots of planning. Douglas is singing as well, so I have to train him to carefully time the mascara to the music. Danny La Rue found it difficult when he once played Albin in Jersey, and this was someone who's entire life had involved making up as a women. I'd literally be standing in the wings screaming, 'Dan, get that wig on quick'!'

Why not try to see things from a different angle?…..

Georges and Albin by Mark Shenton, The Stage Bogs, Shentons View. Thursday 10 January 2008

Last night’s eventual opening of La Cage aux Folles at the Menier Chocolate Factory, after two postponements, was worth waiting for: during the second act, Philip Quast (as the nightclub manager Georges) came into the audience, and partnered me off to the person sitting on the other side of the aisle to me …. namely, the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts! Quast/Georges grabbed each of our hands and made us reach each out and hold the other’s – then declared us “a perfect match”!

I’d have preferred to have been paired off with the Menier’s restaurant supervisor myself – except that he wasn’t in attendance last night. The lovely Douglas was apparently back home in Oz – no doubt attempting to escape the attentions of website journalists (I’m not the only one, apparently, to have made my interest clear).

But either way, it does at least put paid to The Guardian blog’s speculation yesterday about my “unnamed special lady friend” who was helping me to immediately honour my New Year’s resolutions to reduce my “madcap schedule”, when I referred to spending a few days in Devon with her last week.

On such throwaway comments, of course, are entire theories built; but it is flattering to think that people care. It’s also nice of the Guardian to refer to me as “the hardest-working blogger in theatre (maybe)”. But nowadays, naturally, everyone’s private lives are public. Given that one of my jobs is to profile actors that help make that be the case, and since keeping a blog lifts a regular lid on my own life, I can hardly be surprised when some of that becomes a cause of wider conversation. I put myself out here – and to borrow from La Cage Aux Folles itself, “It’s my world that I want to take a little pride in,/My world, and it’s not a place I have to hide in./Life’s not worth a damn,/’Til you can say, ‘Hey world, I am what I am.’”

The need for that affirmative cry is still as resonant today as it was when La Cage Aux Folles first opened on Broadway 25 years ago this summer. I saw that original production from the balcony of the Palace Theatre twice then – and it made a big impact on my young life. The way that it articulates the ideas that gay men can form different kinds of families – but no less valid ones – is radical, even today; but Broadway’s matinee ladies happily accepted the idea of two middle-aged men so easily in love with each other. And that was huge progress.

But then the steps towards acceptance that this represented were violently overturned by the scourge of AIDS that was tragically emerging at exactly the time the show first opened…. and with it, a great hole was created in the theatregoing (and theatremaking) community on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, there were some that blamed the show’s failure when it came to the London Palladium in 1986 on the backlash that was created in the disease’s wake; and it was difficult for even the gay community to deal with a feelgood show about our lives at a time when there was so much to feel bad about.

Reviews:

'La Cage': Iconic and well refreshed

Review (including (Nicholas Nickleby) by Matt Wolf, International Herald Tribune, January 15, 2008

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The first "Nicholas Nickleby" opened in October 1981 on Broadway, where it was followed nearly two years later by a big, blowsy musical, "La Cage aux Folles," that in its own way helped define the theatrical times. That original "La Cage" was a genuine first: a musical that put center stage the love between two gay men to a degree we may now take for granted but that was once sufficiently eye-opening as to offer up the subsequent onslaught of AIDS as the reason for the same show's commercially unsuccessful London engagement a few years later. In that particular context, it makes all the sense in the world to reconceived "La Cage" for London as a chamber musical happening well away from the West End - even if the presence in the main roles of two name players, Douglas Hodge and Philip Quast, indicates a Menier Chocolate Factory revival with its eye on the mainstream.

With luck, this "La Cage" will find the prolonged life it richly deserves, not least so audiences can feast on a central pairing that approaches the sublime. Most recently seen as a resonant-voiced Juan Perón in the revival of "Evita," Quast brings great delicacy to Gene Barry's original Broadway part as the nightclub owner, Georges, this actor's trucker physique at delicious odds with the capering ease with which he chats up the audience. The story, as you may recall from the popular French film of the same name or its Hollywood remake, "The Birdcage," relates what happens when Georges's son from a long ago heterosexual fling invites for an introductory visit the uptight parents of his fiancée. The all-important conundrum: what to do with Albin, Georges's partner and the sequined star of his Riviera watering hole and someone who is unlikely to take being cast aside to suit moral conventions, well, lying down.

As might be expected from a venue a fraction the size of many Broadway and West End barns, Terry Johnson's production puts the emphasis on feeling as opposed to glitz and asks its (mostly) expert company to play Harvey Fierstein's book for real. The result makes for almost too naturalistic a first half-hour or so, the cast so becalmed that they seem scarcely to realize that the audience is there. But once Lynne Page's choreography gets the leggy chorus of Cagelles going (can you spot the one actual woman in the group?), the actors up both the energy and volume, to tell of a man, Albin, who, however mincing, won't be made so much emotional mincemeat.

Hodge's risky performance, at once stylized and very shrewd, marks a huge departure for a performer one tends to associate with Chekhov, Shakespeare and Pinter, and he brings infinite modulation to what could be a shriek fest. Anyone who's seen Quast before knows the Australian performer can sing with the same easeful confidence with which he acts. But a Pinter expert sporting mascara and pumps and belting out the gay anthem, "I Am What I Am," that remains the best-known number of Jerry Herman's score? That's no more surprising than a musical that once seemed gaudy but superficial revealing behind the folderol a fierce and beating heart.

La Cage aux Folles

Review by Sarah Monaghan, Theatreworld Internet Magazine, 15th Janaury 2008

For this production the Chocolate Factory has metamorphosized into a transvestite nightclub in 1980's St. Tropez called La Cage Aux Folles. You walk through a narrow corridor lined in crimson velvet and then enter the "club" to find chairs and tables at the front (for the ultra brave) and a mass of velvet swags and tails and ruche hot pink nylon.

Georges (Philip Quast) and Albin (Douglas Hodge), a couple who have been together 20 years, run the club. Georges is the smooth compere and Albin, an aging diva, is the star of the show but tonight there are problems. Georges' 24 year old son (whom they have both raised as their own) wants to get married - to a woman. As if that's not bad enough, his fiancée's father is an eminent Politian who's party loathes gays and anything vaguely untraditional. Albin, with his wiggles, flounces and coquettish ways, has got to go (or at least hide for 24 hours) along with any evidence of their gay lifestyle until the parental visit is over. But who's going to be brave enough to tell Albin?

This is a wonderful show for so many different reasons.

"Les Cagelles" (the transvestite dancers) look wonderful and are so talented. The choreography is some of the most challenging I've ever seen but whether it's modern, tap or the cancan, they make it all look effortless.

I loved the attention to detail in the staging and lighting - it was like looking at a living, breathing Toulouse Lautrec painting as they danced the cancan whilst the footlights cast absinthe green shadows on their faces.

The songs are great "I am what I am" being the best known and the book is laugh out loud funny.

Philip Quast is perfect as the smooth but somewhat weary Georges who continues to love Albin who is more high maintenance than an army of Hollywood "A" listers. Quast has the smoothest, richest voice that just makes you want to melt (I remember him bringing a tear to my eye in South Pacific at the National).

Douglas Hodge really succeeds in making Albin his own. He managed to look different throughout the musical, sometimes putting me in mind of Diana Dors and towards the end looking like an aging Princess Diana on acid. Through his performance you see that this is not really a play about being gay, it's about getting old, feeling insecure, being brave enough to be yourself and finding out who loves you and who you love.

La Cage aux Folles

Review by Jack Hughes, Rogues and Vagabonds website, 13 January 2008

La Cage Aux Folles has had a chequered career as a musical. It received enormous acclaim on its initial Broadway run in 1983 and controversially beat off pretty heavyweight competition from Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George to all that year's major Tony Awards for musicals. Sondheim did go on to win that year's Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park so in terms of historical retrospect the balance has been addressed.

Ultimately that initial production became a victim of the of the AIDS epidemic which was sweeping across the western world throughout the 1980s. A frivolous musical comedy about a pair of middle-aged gay men and their St. Tropez Drag Club became a little out of sync with the way the public were having to view gay men. The fey, limp-wristed queen had become stronger through tragedy and was less likely to be laughed at.

The show ran for a respectable time on Broadway but the transfer to London in 1986 was less successful as the ordinary theatre goers stayed away. Public tastes had changed for good it seemed.

Since then the show has hardly surfaced professionally on this side of the Atlantic. The London Transport Players did have a highly acclaimed amateur production which became a yearly fixture on the theatre scene in the 1990s but that too seems to be long gone now.

So La Cage has been, for quite a while, one of those shows ripe for a revival. Of course the enterprising people at the Menier Chocolate Factory knew this and with their usual theatrical sleight of hand they have attempted to condense this lavish and lush, old-style musical into a studio-size production.

Now, the received history around this show has always been about the extravagance of the production. Les Cagelles, the show's all-singing, all-dancing drag chorus of (mostly) men were a theatrical legend, noted most for their feminine glamour and choreographic dexterity. The scenic and costume excesses were also famous. Costumiers nationwide still speak in hushed tones of awe when they remember the many gowns that adorned the stage in La Cage.

At the Chocolate Factory they are unable to recreate these kinds of excesses for the simple reason that the performance space is not large enough. So if you were hoping for twenty-four Cagelles tapping and can-can-ing their way through fifteen costume changes a show you will be sadly disappointed. Instead there are only six Cagelles but the production team have obviously thought hard and long about their contribution to the evening's entertainment.

In place of lavish excess the Cagelles now have a much more darkly glamorous presence. They still dance up a storm but their routines have been spiced with a Torture Garden, leather, feather and silk quality which adds a welcome edge of danger to the proceedings. Their end of Act One spectacular still develops into a Can-Can but it is a Can-Can filled with dangerous gymnastics and the kind of screams which smudge the line between pleasure and pain.

This darker quality also makes perfect sense of why this club has such a notorious reputation and why a morally upright political candidate would wish to see it permanently closed down. When this politician is your prospective father-in-law, any young man wishing to impress would like to present a respectable family background.

But at the heart of this show's plot stands 24 year old Jean-Michel who happens to be the only son of the owner of the aforesaid notorious club. To make matters worse, the person who has deputized for his absentee mother is a man, who just happens to be the club's even more notorious headline drag act. When a visit from your hoped-for in-laws is imminent, the farcical potential in La Cage is immense.

The Menier production is at its strongest when it is dealing with the battered emotions contained in this unconventional family as they prepare to meet their nemesis in-laws. The loving bond between Georges (father) and Albin (mother) is real and palpable and during the course of the show weathers many storms and shocks.

They are a gay couple living in a time when public shows of affection between men were still frowned upon. When they allow only their fingers to touch on a street cafe table during one heartfelt exchange, it is moving, but when that exchange is Jerry Herman's romantic song of first love remembered, 'Song on the Sand', it is almost unbearably so. Douglas Hodge and Philip Quast as Albin and Georges are wonderful at presenting this gay relationship as a fully formed, warts and all, love match, which quite obviously sits at the core of each man's life.

Equally as strong is the bond between parents and child. When an ungrateful Jean-Michel complains about his 'mother' Albin, he is upbraided by Georges with the beautiful song, 'Look Over There', another Herman classic. This song is reprised with great emotional effect right at the dramatic crux of this family's story. It is sentimental, impassioned and shattering at one and the same time, and a perfect example of why, sometimes, there is nothing quite like musical theatre.

The production at the Menier does have its deficiencies. There are times when the proceedings feel a little on the bald side, particularly where the score is not quite as inventive as perhaps the plot is requiring it to be. The dialogue as written by Harvey Fierstein is a light and airy camp confection thinly hiding strong emotional truths; it needs to be played with a modicum more style and panache by some members of the company. I also feel that some of the direct interaction with the audience is a little tentative and lacking in confidence but hopefully this will improve as the run progresses.

But these negatives are easily forgiven in a production which positively bubbles with so much that is great and grand from the world of musical theatre. Simply staged and honestly performed numbers are the secret of this production's success and there is little to compare to the company's rendition of 'The Best of Times'. It is a typical Jerry Herman big number in the vein of 'Hello Dolly' or 'Mame', in that the tune is repeated and repeated with the occasional key change. It is not even a particularly sophisticated song despite all its Gallic flavour. But at the Menier it is transformed into a spontaneous, exuberant, from-the heart, restaurant sing-a-long. The straightforward, un-flashy staging combined with the company's obvious enjoyment makes it absolutely beguiling.

This chamber style staging of La Cage Aux Folles is a risky undertaking for the Menier. It is a daring trick and one that requires a few difficult sacrifices, but in doing so they have transformed this show from a fabled, flighty, entertainment into a very moving, gay, family drama.

And who knows, perhaps in the future we will see those fabled London Underground Cagelles again. If they were to drive tube trains in all their finery, perhaps commuting would become a tad more entertaining.

Confused? Tired of Life? Then Bring on the Dancing Girls!

Review by Rhoda Koenig, The Independent on Sunday, 13 January 2008

With its strong appeal to a specific section of the market, it's easy to see why La Cage aux Folles was such a hit in 1983. There's a middle-aged former beauty, hating what the mirror shows but forcing herself to face life and "put a little more mascara on". There's a preoccupied man, sometimes neglecting his wife, but responding to her tantrums with understanding and reassurance. There's even a hymn to mother love, sung by the father, later reprised by the son: "Someone puts himself last/So that you can come first."

Yes, "himself" is the right word, for the "mother" and "wife" is Albin, a drag artiste at the St Tropez nightclub run by Georges, his lover of 20 years. The two have raised a son, the result of Georges' one night of curiosity, who wants to marry the daughter of a right-wing politician. Albin is asked to disappear while the politician visits – but will he? This is not a plot but a situation, and an idiotic one, not greatly improved by Harvey Fierstein's mediocre, dated book and Jerry Herman's bouncy-schmaltzy songs.

Yet all objections vanish in the face of Terry Johnson's effervescent production. Transforming the Menier into a rose-coloured nightclub, he has assembled a crack cast, including a troupe of pouting, shrieking imitation girls who leap on to the ringside tables. Though he overdoes the hysteria at first, Douglas Hodge becomes a genuinely touching Albin, making that pub-singalong standard "The Best of Times" an affecting plea for tenderness. Una Stubbs as the politician's wife and Tara Hugo as a nightclub proprietress are the personification of, respectively, mature sweetness and mature cosmopolitan charm. And when Jason Pennycooke's French maid, a ruffle-clad, wriggling bundle of camp comes on, you can practically smell the Narcisse Noir.

Best of all is Philip Quast, who, in a moustache and wig that makes him look like Don Ameche's father, is a purring benevolent Georges, gliding along with movements that are just a little too precise – he literally as well as figuratively never wants to put a foot wrong. More restrained emotionally than Albin, he manages to convey feelings at least as powerful in "Song on the Sand", a reflection on long-lived, constant love. When one considers how many gay men provided the musical accompaniment to heterosexual romance, this gentle ballad strikes one as a coming-out that was a long time coming.

La Cage aux Folles

by Georgina Brown, The Mail on Sunday, 13 January 2008 (4 Stars)

Delayed by plague upon plague of winter lurgies, the Menier Chocolate Factory's Christmas show, a revival of the Eighties hit La Cage aux Folles, proves well worth the wait and more.

This deliciously ticklish French farce by Jerry Herman (music and lyrics) and Harvey Fierstein (book) is a sappy, happy portrait of marriage. With a twist.

The couple, who run a nightclub in St Tropez, just happen to be gay, and the gorgeous girls strutting their stuff every night in spangled girdles trimmed with a froth of feathers just happen to be guys. But you must look closely, because in Terry Johnson's new production, there's one lass among these lissom, lovely lads, who strip, tease and high-kick their way through the show.

But the star is Douglas Hodge's Albin. By day, he's a housewife to Georges (Philip Quast in twinkly form and terrific voice); by night, he pours his barrel chest into satin and sequins, and purrs his girlie heart out as ZaZa, queen of La Cage Aux Folles.

It's a rich role that requires Hodge (who is 100 per cent he-man) to play an irresistible sex siren with utter conviction, then try (disastrously) to be butch, and finally, but with similar passion, pretend to be the mother of Georges' son (at once mincing and matron-like, and utterly persuasive, if a bit fruity, until his wig suddenly slips off). He succeeds in being variously hilarious, grotesque and genuinely touching.

There are a few creaks. The engaged couple, who need everyone to play straight to impress the awful in-laws, couldn't be less engaging, but otherwise the show is a highly recommended hoot.

La Cage aux Folles

Review by Mark Shenton, The Sunday Express 13 January 2008 (4 Stars)

There's a triple threat of wonder, delight and exhilaration in the theatre this week that celebrates unconventional ways of looking at the world. In the process, the unique capabilities of the human body, as well as the infinite capacities of the heart, are all pressed into making great art.

Soaring above it all, in every sense is the latest Cirque du Soleil show Varekai, making its British debut at the Royal Albert Hall, ..... Its performers like to see things from a different angle.

That's also the suggestion, coincidentally made by drag queen Albin in the 1993 Broadway musical version of the hit French comedy La Cage aux Folles, as he sings that great anthem of self-acceptance, 'I Am What I Am'. Douglas Hodge sings it with blazing conviction in a new, intentionally small-scale revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory and if both he and the production seem initially tentative, it delivers a bigger pay-off as this still surprisingly radical subversion of conventional family values takes hold.

A young man, raised by a male couple in a St Tropez drag nightclub, seeks to bring his fiancee's reactionary parents to dinner, but needs to hide the truth of his upbringing. That means asking his father (played by Philip Quast with warmth and resonance) to get his partner Albin to make himself scarce. Hodge plays the hurt of the suggestion with such truthfulness and invests Albin with so much charm and heart that it anchors the show.

The Menier, currently riding high with a West End transfer for its brilliant production of Dealer's Choice and a Broadway run of its staging of Sondheim's Sunday In The Park With George about to open, too, has brought La Cage to new life, as well as its own space, which does brilliant double duty as a nightclub now.

Jerry Herman's bouncy score and Harvey Fierstein's witty book remain a brilliant Trojan horse, too to deliver a wonderful hunman message that there are all sorts of families.

.......

Straight from the heart

Review by Ian Shuttleworth , Financial Times, 12th January 2008

The Chocolate Factory had doubtless been hoping for a clutch of strong reviews of this staging of Jerry Herman's musical to boost their business over the holiday season. Unfortunately, illness led to the press night being twice postponed. I think that decision was, artistically at least, the right one. The show does not stand or fall solely on the performance of no-longer-poorly Douglas Hodge, but no understudy would have given the same flavour. Drag is an idiosyncratic art, and more so in this comedy in which the ploy is reversed. Here, a flamboyant drag artiste has first to learn to behave like a heterosexual man and then successfully to impersonate a woman (very different from the ambiguity of drag), for the benefit of his "son's strait-laced in-laws-to-be.

Hodge at first struck me as too much the mincing, wispily voiced stereotype. But as the evening progressed, I saw greater complexity, just as in the concept of drag itself. There are also moments at which he makes the role his own, such as when, during his "straight" training, he irresistibly fans himself with a slice of toast. Having been under whelmed by his goofy Nathan Detroit in Guys And Dolls a couple of years ago, I am now happy to revise my opinion of Hodge as musical comedian.

The show itself - both Herman's numbers and Harvey Fierstein's book (from Jean Poiret's original play) - proves surprisingly affecting, and most so when it is least labouring the point. Neither the drag chorus's defiant "We Are What We Are" nor even the big, calculatedly sentimental number "The Best Of Times" strike as powerfully as moments when we see the simple truth that these two middle-aged men cannot help but be deeply in love with each other. Philip Quast as Georges, the "plain homosexual" partner to Hodge's Albin, is a perfect complement - it is his grounding that permits and delimits Albin's diva antics.

The poignancy takes care of itself, and director Terry Johnson has a deft eye for the farcical side of things. And it is always a joy to see Jason Pennycooke, who regularly steals scenes as the couple's butler-cum-"maid".

It's just fabulous, darling

La Cage aux Folles is more frou-frou than ever, while across town a belly dancer titillates on a bare stage

Review by Susannah Clapp, The Observer, January 13th, 2008

Pink ruched curtains; a line of sashaying silhouettes; moues and pouts and flounces. La Cage Aux Folles is frou-frou with a good heart. Terry Johnson's new production doesn't make Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein's musical look more than a forward-looking period piece, but that doesn't much matter. The subject isn't really gay rights, though it waves some banners in the right direction. This is a show about performance, about making yourself up. The biggest number, 'I Am What I Am', is both posture-striking, in a 'My Way' kind of way, and genuinely defiant. It could just as well be called 'I Am Not What I Seem'.

The discreetly gay proprietor of a drag club has brought up his son (product of a one-night stand) with his orchidaceous lover, star of the show: the son gets engaged to the daughter of a homophobic politician called Dindon ('fall guy' in French). A meeting of the families is planned: the drag queen dresses up as the boy's mother. There's chaos and a happy ending.

The Menier was right twice to postpone the opening, until Douglas Hodge had recovered from a bronchial infection and the chorus had got over the vomiting virus. Together they light up the evening. Hodge is magnetic as the sometimes crumpled, sometimes magnificent trannie. He's glam in a beaded frock, sad in a suit. And on press night, spruce and bosomy in a hound's-tooth check jacket, pencil skirt and blond bouffant, he swayed down the aisle, singing to wheezy accordion accompaniment the tearjerker of the show - then paused to join the hands of two male (in one case, Mail) critics.

The trannie (apart from one girl) chorus is out-and-out glorious, with fluorescent bobs, tap-dances in satin shorts and sailor tops, cartwheels, somersaults and synchronised splits. And Una Stubbs has one of those knockout moments when, apparently from nowhere, a character blooms into full life. As the politician's niminy-piminy wife, she suddenly erupts into raucous trannie-friendly song: never has a slip of a thing looked so raunchy.

La Cage aux Folles

Review by David Jays, The Sunday Time, January 13, 2008 (3 Stars)

It’s a Feydeau farce with show tunes: a guy brings his fiancée’s ultraconservative family to meet his gay dads at their trannie nightclub. At the intimate Menier, the club seems less Moulin Rouge than Vauxhall Tavern: les girls, bless ’em, are a bit rough, leering amid assertively ruched curtains.

Terry Johnson’s amiable production has a fitting middle-aged spread, for the first Broadway smash to treat homosexuality also tackles a rarer theme: long-term domesticity, and how love endures despite hissy fits and saggy flesh.

Philip Quast remains devoted (“If you can’t be truthful, be vague”) to Douglas Hodge’s roguish drag queen. Hodge gurgles and growls through his numbers (singing in G – “no, G flat: it’s been a long day”), making “I am what I am” a nervous breakdown in gold lamé. Once more with glitterball.

La Cage aux Folles

Review by Michael Billington, The Guardian, January 11, 2008 (4 Stars)

I never warmed much to this Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein musical back in 1986: its portrait of a gay marriage, before such things were legalised, seemed as cosy as The Sound of Music. But Terry Johnson's terrific revival scores in two ways over the original: it surrounds the central relationship with a louche wildness and boasts a masterly comic performance from Douglas Hodge as the rhinestoned hero.

Once again it has proved that big musicals work best in small spaces. In the style of Sam Mendes in his landmark Cabaret at the Donmar, Johnson turns the Menier into the intimate transvestite club where the action is mostly set: front-row spectators sit at cafe tables and the actors weave among us, at one point hilariously effecting a civil partnership between two surprised drama critics. We also get a close-up view of "Les Cagelles", the glitzy, gender-bending chorus of five men and one woman, for whom Lynne Page has devised exuberant choreography. There is a genuine, cartwheeling madness about their can-can, which ends with them thrusting patrons' heads under their frilly, froufrou frocks.

The gay abandon of the chorus deftly counterpoints the tender relationship between the club's owners, Georges and Albin: one briefly threatened by the proposed marriage of the former's son to the daughter of a rantingly homophobic politician. Philip Quast lends Georges a dapper composure and fine singing voice. But, as in the original, it is Albin who steals the limelight. Hodge brilliantly combines a leering relish in the cabaret numbers, where he suggests a muscular Dusty Springfield, with a domestic outrage at being marginalised for the meeting with the future in-laws. Hodge's shocked features permanently suggest camp on the verge of being struck; and I shall not soon forget his look of prim horror, in the scene where Georges gives him lessons in macho posture, at being told: "Spread your legs."

Herman's songs, without being wildly original, steal over the senses: especially the beguiling Song on the Sand and The Best of Times, which conveys the communal ecstasy without which no musical is complete. But the show's success lies in the fact that it uses the space wittily and rescues the show from its Broadway blandness. Raffishness is combined with romance, reminding us this musical is, at heart, a pop-hymn to male marriage.

La Cage aux Folles: A riot of falsies and sequins

Charles Spencer reviews La Cage aux Folles at the Menier Chocolate Factory, Telegraph, 11th Janaury 2008

The Menier has acquired a high reputation for its musicals, with revivals of Sondheim's sophisticated Sunday in the Park with George and the deliciously schlocky Little Shop of Horrors both transferring to the West End.

I have little doubt that this wildly comic and touching revival of La Cage aux Folles will follow them there.

The show, with a characteristically exuberant score by Jerry (Hello Dolly) Herman and book by Harvey Fierstein, was the first overtly gay musical on Broadway when it opened 25 years ago, and saw off strong competition, including Sunday in the Park and Kander and Ebb's The Rink to collect half a dozen Tony Awards.

At a time when the Aids epidemic was creating misery and fear and even as traditionally tolerant a city as New York wasn't proving immune to nasty bouts of homophobia, this unashamedly sentimental account of gay life, with its celebrated if slightly cheesy anthem I Am What I Am, had a serious political point to make beyond the cross-dressing, the farcical action and the gags.

The show may now seem too soft-centered for some tastes, and even in Terry Johnson's robust and splendidly performed production there are moments when you find yourself thinking wistfully of the greater daring and emotional clout of a show like Cabaret, which occupies similar dramatic territory.

But it seems churlish to carp when a show is as much fun as this.

The titular Cage aux Folles is a drag nightclub on the French Riviera. Its suave owner-manager and emcee, Georges (Philip Quast), and its most outrageous star Albin (Douglas Hodge) have been living in monogamous contentment for 20 years, but early in life, Georges fathered a child.

At 24, the lad has fallen in love with a woman and wants to marry. Unfortunately, the girl's strait-laced parents (the father is a grand fromage in "the Tradition, Family and Morality Party") want to meet the boy's parents to see if they are suitable, and our gay heroes have to don a mask of upstanding heterosexual respectability.

It's all a bit predictable, but it works. Johnson's production has two secret weapons up its sleeve. The first are the astonishing drag routines, a riot of wigs, falsies and sequins performed by a tremendous six-strong chorus of "Cagelles".

They are a theatrical knock-out, both funny and disconcertingly sexy, and you really can't distinguish the five boys from the one real woman in the ranks.

During a misspent youth I occasionally visited the drag pub the Vauxhall Tavern. This lot are far more impressive than anything I ever saw there - and unlike most drag artistes they actually sing the songs rather than mime them.

The moment in Lynne Page's exuberant choreography when they all leap into the air and then go down into the splits made my eyes water in sympathy.

The other great asset is Douglas Hodge, in real life about as effeminate as Lawrence Dallaglio, and last seen on stage scaring audiences half to death as a raging Titus Andronicus.

Here however he is every inch a dame, all moues and bridles and flouncing outrage, hymning the delights of mascara, wallowing in a sea of self-pity and with a drama-queen's hissy fit for every crisis in the plot.

He's wonderfully funny when he pretends to be straight, genuinely touching in his concern for the boy he regards as his son and his love for his partner.

Quast is superb too as the far less flamboyant Georges, lending the show an unexpected dignity, and with the exception of insufferably bland performances from the actors playing the heterosexual love interest, La Cage aux Folles proves a constant pleasure, and exactly the winter warmer the dark nights of January require.

La Cage aux Folles

Georges and AlbinReview by Michael Coveney, Whats On Stage, 10th January 2008 (5 Stars)

You enter the theatre through a red velvet corridor and face a curtain of pink ruched silk. The seven-piece band is perched on high, either side of the stage. There is a glitter ball and a smoky atmosphere. One really could be sitting in one of those St Tropez transvestite night clubs that is the setting of La Cage aux Folles, the first gay Broadway musical – music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, book by Harvey Fierstein – now revived in the absolutely spot-on intimate setting of the Menier Chocolate Factory.

Terry Johnson’s production has been bedevilled by illness suffered first by Douglas Hodge, who plays the star drag queen Albin, then by several other cast members. Press night, initially set before Christmas, has arrived at last. Was it worth the wait? You betcha. Not only has the 1983 show – seen in the West End in 1986 starring George Hearn as Albin and Denis Quilley as his partner Georges, the club-owner – found new life on a more compressed scale; it boasts a really extraordinary central performance.

Hodge’s Albin is a backstage diva whose already precarious sense of self-esteem is further threatened when George (Philip Quast) declares that “their” son Jean-Michel (Neil McDermott) is about to marry a girl (Alicia Davies) whose father is moral guardian of the Riviera; George wants to invite Jean-Michel’s blood mother to the apartment and consign Albin to off-stage anonymity.

The show recounts, of course, how Albin turns the conditions of conduct on their head and wins over the girl’s parents with a little moral pressure. While the original delightful French film of 1978 (remade less successfully by Robin Williams in 1996 as The Birdcage) was an acidic farce with filigree detail and social precision, the musical lingers on the sentimentality of same-sex relationships and celebrates the raucousness of the out-gay life.

What Hodge offers is a dazzling journey through the joys and pitfalls of his status in society. Un-wigged in his dressing room, he can resemble the sad clown Pagliacci, or Judi Dench in the last act of Amy’s View; in full show regalia, he’s the Dusty Springfield of the night clubs; in the cafe scene, where he’s encouraged to “walk like a man” (or, at least, John Wayne), he assumes the black-garbed menacing exterior of Harold Pinter.

Beside him, Philip Quast’s Georges is a rock-like presence with a tender baritonal voice. Herman’s show tunes are as rousing as ever, but you notice more now the ingenious dramatic extensions to items like “With Anne on My Arm” and the “Cocktail Counterpoint”. “I Am What I Am” and “The Best of Times” remain irresistible knockout anthems, and the score has been brilliantly re-orchestrated by Jason Carr.

Lynne Page’s choreography, David Farley’s set design, and Matthew Wright’s costumes are all superb. A strong supporting cast includes Tara Hugo as a bitchy restaurateur and Una Stubbs and Iain Mitchell as the fiancee’s bemused then thoroughly absorbed parents. “Les Cagelles” are all brilliant and you can have fun spotting the one real girl (Kay Murphy) in their number, especially during the legs-in-the-air sequence.

The First Night Feature: La Cage Aux Folles

Review by MA, Society of London Theatre, Official London Theatre Guide, 10 January 2008

High camp, gloriously sparkly and provocative costumes, plush drapery, champagne; the Menier Chocolate Factory has been transformed into fabulously frilly transvestite revue bar La Cage Aux Folles for the theatre’s latest musical offering. Matthew Amer joined the first night audience for this comic musical tale of family drama, enduring love and being true to yourself.

The Menier’s latest musical production has been beset by illness, twice postponing its press night, yet no-one would have known following last night’s performance. Leading man Douglas Hodge has been suffering with a bronchial infection since before Christmas, but last night – in high heels, mascara and numerous wigs and dresses – any sign of weariness was further from him than a deep butch voice and powerful handshake.

For Hodge, in Jerry Herman’s musical, plays Albin, drag queen par excellence at La Cage who is more melodramatic than a BBC costume drama. What Hodge delivers is not Graham Norton-esque comedy campness, but a sometimes coy, often brazen needy man wanting only to be loved… and to wear outrageous frocks at any opportunity.

To Hodge’s scene stealing Albin, Philip Quast delivers a cleverly understated, reserved, but deeply loving Georges, Albin’s partner and the owner of La Cage. The pair complement each other in life and on the stage.

When Georges’s son, who has been raised by the homosexual couple, announces that he intends to marry the daughter of a prominent moralistic politician, and that the in-laws are coming to visit, the unorthodox family is thrown into panic. The suggestion that Albin makes himself scarce is met with predictable drama.

A musical set in a drag bar could not fail to be camp. David Farley, once more providing the design for a Menier musical, has created a world of pink curtains and Judy Garland memorabilia. La Cage’s chorus, Les Cagelles, all dragged up to the nines – apart from the one woman, Kay Murphy, playing a man playing a woman – possess pins that many of the fairer sex would gladly give their right leg to own, and perform Lynne Page’s choreography with an exuberant sense of fun and sex.

Jason Pennycooke, as butler/maid/wannabe performer Jacob, turns the camp affectation up to ten, fabulously flouncing his way through the show.

Herman’s catchy score blends the sexy playfulness of club number La Cage Aux Folles with the deep sentimentality of Song On The Sand and Look Over There, and the anthem for individuality and acceptance, I Am What I Am.

But it is the central combination of Hodge and Quast, under the subtle direction of Terry Johnson, that gives a musical which could so easily escape into the realms of cheap vulgarity and stereotype, a beating heart. In their relationship, the truth of an enduring love cuts through the glitter and the glamour, providing a warm ‘aaaah’ to go with all the ‘oohs’ and ‘ohs’ of the club scenes.

La Cage aux Folles, Menier Chocolate Factory on 26th December, Russell's Theatre Reviews website

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