This was published 3 months ago
‘Big, brassy, and political’: La Cage aux Folles returns to the stage
By Bill Wyman
At the beginning of backstage musical 42nd Street, a hopeful young ingénue named Peggy arrives in New York with the dream of making it on Broadway. Things don’t go as planned, but at the last minute a star of a big new show is injured. Peggy steps in at the last minute and saves the day.
And so it was for the very young theatre director Riley Spadaro who, last November, had just overseen The Italians at Belvoir St Theatre.
Paul Capsis in La Cage aux Folles.Credit: John McRae.
Unbeknownst to him, actor Paul Capsis, possessor of five Helpmann Awards, saw a performance.
“I guess he had a religious experience at the theatre,” Spadaro recalls with a laugh. “He really liked it!”
Three weeks later a producer called. It was Spadaro’s 42nd Street moment. A revival of a much different iconic backstage musical, La Cage aux Folles, was underway, with Capsis himself starring. But circumstances had caused their director to drop out. They’d been in rehearsals for four days. “Are you available?” the producer asked. “Paul Capsis wants you to direct the show.”
And so the 26-year-old, a partner in a self-described “big gay theatre company” that goes by the proudly lower-cased name of bud, but still plying a day job doing marketing for an ed-tech startup, took on the biggest challenge of his short career.
La Cage aux folles is a full-blown classic Broadway musical.Credit: John McRae
It’s a full-blown classic Broadway musical, one that contains big songs and bigger emotions, and is a touchstone for the emergence of gay culture in the West over the last half century.
“As much as it’s seen as this big brassy show,” Spadaro notes, “I do think it’s very political, and very artful. And there’s a real open-heartedness about it.”
La Cage aux Folles was first a French play, and then a French movie, way back in 1978. The story follows the travails of a drag show impresario, Georges, who is in a long-term relationship with his ensemble’s intemperate and overdramatic star, Albin, stage name Zaza.
The day-to-day chaos ramps up into general hysteria when Georges’ son from a long-ago heterosexual relationship brings home first a fiancée, and then her very conservative parents. Hijinks ensue as the couple try to present an appearance of normality, until, of course, their own normality reasserts itself.
The cast of La Cage aux Folles.Credit: John McRae
The film, unexpectedly, found a growing and then ecstatic audience around the world in 1979. (It is often said to have been the highest grossing foreign film in America to that time.) The implicit moral – why do Georges and Albin have to adjust to be someone else’s “normal”? – resonated.
Then came a stage show, with big old-fashioned Broadway tunes by Jerry Herman, who’d written the songs for Hello, Dolly! and Mame. The book was by Harvey Fierstein. (Fierstein, now known for his outlandish drag roles delivered with his distinctive raspy voice, was at the time a newly minted Broadway star with the success of his play Torch Song Trilogy.)
Their musical, directed by the legendary Arthur Laurents, who wrote West Side Story and directed the original Gypsy, swept the Tony Awards that year. The show played in Sydney and Melbourne for nearly a year. (In the 1990s, celebrated film director Mike Nichols produced a US film version, The Birdcage, starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.)
The musical hit Broadway around the same time the AIDS crisis was spreading around the world. Laurents, Sparados notes, “wanted to make sure hetero couples coming to theatre would have an excellent time but also leave changed.”
Robin Williams (left) and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage.
Actor Todd McKenney has performed in the show twice – once, in a smaller part in the show’s original ’80s edition and then taking on the flamboyant Albin role some years later. “It was the most thrilling experience I’ve ever had,” he recalls.
The world in which the original La Cage was staged was not always a friendly one. “It was definitely a ground-breaking show, it really was,” McKenney says. “When we did the original one, it did ok. But there was quite a bit of negative press about our show. I forget which paper but someone wrote, ‘Be careful what glasses you drink out of when you go to the theatre.’”
Today, in urban areas, at least, gay culture is mainstream, but, as many transgender youth can tell you, intolerance, and hate, is ever-present beneath the surface. La Cage aux Folles, then as now, reminds us that there are real people being themselves at the other end of that hate.
“At its heart,” says Spadaro, “it’s about love and joy and living authentically as one’s true self.”
He says he draws inspiration from a passage in Laurents’ memoir. “I think I can remember it exactly,” Spadaro says: “‘Do the work for the sheer pleasure of doing the work. And if you can be proud of the result, you’ve succeeded no matter what happens.’ That’s been my north star.”
La Cage aux Folles is at the State Theatre April 19 to 23.
A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.