Something about sharing—something about always

I slept for an hour and a half last night, so this is not going to be the world's most coherent review of the Longacre Theatre's revival of La Cage aux Folles, but run-on sentences are what you get at one-thirty in the morning when the author has to get up early for museums the next day. (I'm behind on posting, I know. I'm in New York.)

I grew up with the original cast recording, because it was Jerry Herman and we had it around the house with Mack & Mabel, Hello, Dolly!, and Mame, and what I want now is a recording of this cast, because I think they are better.

Certainly Douglas Hodge is better than George Hearn, which I had not contemplated. Probably best known as the definitive Sweeney Todd, Hearn was and is a physically impressive man with a striking baritone voice, which made him an intriguing (and successful—he won multiple awards for the role) choice of casting for Albin, whose life is more than half spent as the star attraction of La Cage aux Folles, the drag queen Zaza. Hodge is smaller, with a character actor's back-handed compliment of a face, not precisely handsome in either gender, and a half-waspish, half-humming tenor that lends itself well to impersonations—Ethel Merman here, Carol Channing there, a melisma of Judy Garland—as well as its own stage-gossip patter and needle; he's full of nerves and mannerisms and drama, with more than a touch of the music-hall clown about him and therefore more than a touch of the pantomime dame: Angela Carter could have written him and he's probably dreamed of being Quentin Crisp. He's first introduced in a housecoat, a hairnet, and rubber gloves, washing dishes and smoking in aggressive housewifery when he should be knocking 'em dead at La Cage because Georges missed their lunch date. Convinced by Georges to go on with the traditional combination of undying love and shameless blackmail, he begins the process of transforming himself restoratively into Zaza, who is at once living proof that camp is not dead and a strangely powerful figure, because bitchy, fluttery, footlights-Cockney Albin is funny—and the musical does take a risk in introducing him so, because thereafter the audience might only laugh at him—and Zaza in her sequins and shimmies and towering hair can command a room with one glance from her mascara-lashed eyes. But he's the center of the musical, because when their son Jean-Michel comes home with surprise news of his engagement to the daughter of the rightest-wing politician on the Riviera, it's Albin that he essentially asks to disappear. Just for the one night he's supposed to introduce the two families, the kid stresses, but it doesn't matter; it is the most painful thing that has ever happened to Albin, here in this world where he's been safe with his music and his husband of twenty years and the (tragically, painfully conventional) son they have raised together, and this revival knows that the real question is not whether everyone's going to make it through dinner with the Dindons without camping, screaming, or accidentally burning the apartment down, but what is going to happen to Georges and Albin.

A moment for Kelsey Grammer, who I realize I am giving short shrift to; I had never taken any particular notice of him as an actor, and he's really good. As the nightclub owner and emcee, he's the non-transvestite half of the marriage and therefore the one who, though he's never considered it before, has never needed to be quite as brave as his husband. Georges has the looks and the suavity of a leading man from the '30's—allowing him to carry off the fashions of the '70's on whose lapels a lesser man might have foundered—and a pleasant, slightly gritty baritone that talk-sings its way through his introductions of Zaza and Les Cagelles and he can, if he has to, pass. Not terribly well (he's a very bad liar), but evidently well enough that he didn't spend his adolescence getting beaten up on a regular basis. Albin at breakfast might as well be subtitled "Toast and Flaming Queen." And he goes out with Georges to the same café where they were young lovers and holds hands with him across the table and makes himself not be scared off when a very butch fisherman of uncertain intentions settles nearby to mend his nets—as deeply as he loves Albin, Georges has perhaps never thought about this. And perhaps Albin has never realized it either, that he's the stronger of the two. "I Am What I Am" is white-hot: discovering against his own self-perceptions the bloodyminded champagne-for-my-real-friends-real-pain-for-the-other-bastards integrity underneath the insecurities both self-dramatizing and real. As I said, I want a recording. And he is seen at the very end of the show, not onstage as Zaza, not the different kind of onstage as Albin when he's dressed to face the world in his silk scarf and sunglasses and fedora and rouge, but as himself at the end of a day, a middle-aged man without makeup, in trousers and shirtsleeves, with crow's feet around his smile and curly dark hair that's receded far more than he will ever like to admit, sitting on the bandbox steps with the poise of a duchess and the warmth of a lover: and he's beautiful. He's beautiful to us and he has always, always been beautiful to Georges. What the curtain comes down on is their kiss.

I am, of course, leaving out the entire rest of the musical, but it was of comparable intelligence and delight. Astonishing dancers. A lot of fun with choreography. "I hired a butler."—"And you got a maid." Someone here had better win a lot of Tonys, is all I'm saying.