LA CAGE AUX FOLLES

Pasadena Playhouse’s five-year-long winning streak of Broadway musical revivals comes to a crashing halt with Sam Pinkleton’s ill-conceived take on the 1980s Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein classic La Cage Aux Folles.

In the right hands, La Cage can be an absolute delight.

To begin with, it’s got one catchy Herman tune after another (including the sing-along-ready “The Best Of Times” and the gay anthem “I Am What I Am”), a hilarious book by LGBT icon Fierstein, and a message of love and acceptance every bit as relevant in 2024 as it was in its 1983 Broadway premiere.

 Plot wheels are set in motion when drag-nightclub owner Georges’ (Cheyenne Jackson) twenty-year-old son Jean-Michel (Ryan J. Haddad), the result of his father’s one and only heterosexual one-night fling, announces to Papa his impending nuptials to Anne (Shannon Purser), the daughter of a right-wing, anti-gay politician named Edouard Dindon (Michael McDonald).

 Won over by his clearly smitten son, Georges must now convince the unapologetically flamboyant Albin (Kevin Cahoon), the undisputed star of Georges’s Les Cagelles drag show and the unequivocal love of his life, to absent himself when Anne, her father, and her mother Marie (Nicole Parker) pay a visit to their daughter’s fiancé’s family.

And that, unfortunately, is more easily said than done.

 It’s a plot that has delighted audiences since La Cage Aux Folles debuted as a French-language play in 1973, then got adapted five years later as a French-language movie, and finally made its Broadway debut as a splashy 1983 musical so successful, it ran for more than four years, won six Tonys, and got revived twice (in 2004 and 2010), each time scoring a Best Revival Tony win.

Given this spectacular track record, you might expect it to succeed once more at the Pasadena Playhouse.

 You’d be wrong, unfortunately, given director Pinkleton’s disastrous decision to throw out almost everything that has made La Cage Aux Folles so beloved, and for what?

So that the divine Albin could become a grating hysteric surrounded by a bunch of equally off-putting supporting characters?

 So that a septet of Cagelles (Kay Bebe Quueue, Cody Brunelle-Potter, Salina EsTitties, Rhoyle Ivy-King, Ellen Soraya Nikbakht, Suna Jade Reid, and Paul Vogt) could come across as grotesque circus clowns executing Ani Taj’s bizarre choreography in David Reynoso’s costume design eyesores and Alberto “Albee” Alvarado’s equally frightful wigs?

So that Albin’s Act One finale solo “I Am What I Am” could be sung with such over-the-top self-indulgence that for the first time ever, it moved me not to tears, but to a sigh of relief that it was over?

 So that Francis (El Beh) and Jacqueline (Shea Diamond) could become caricatures of their previous selves, with only George Salazar’s spotlight-seeking wannabe Cagelle Jacob hitting just the right comedic notes?

 All of this makes Haddad’s sweet, sincere Jean-Michel and Purser’s engaging Anne stand out amongst the crazies, and makes Jackson’s handsome, dynamic, caring, pitch-perfectly played and sung Georges the best (and pretty much the only) reason to see the La Cage.

Things do improve a bit in Act Two. Georges’s attempts to school Albin in “Masculinity” make for such a surefire laugh-getter that even here it’s a keeper, and McDonald and Parker fare a good deal better as the Dindons when Anne’s culturally conservative parents meet George and his “wife,” though even here Cahoon’s strident, haggish take on Jean-Michel’s “mother” is as poorly conceived as his rocker dude “Uncle Al” was only minutes before.

At the very least, Herman’s trademark show tunes survive mostly intact, or at least those performed by Jackson and Haddad, credit shared with music director extraordinaire Daryl Archibald.

Stacey Derosier’s appropriately flashy lighting and Daniel Erdberg and Ursula Kwong-Brown’s expert lighting complete the show’s over-the-top production design.

Casting is by Ryan Bernard Tymensky, CSA. Chris Waters is stage manager and Sam Allen and Lydia Runge are assistant stage managers. Brad Enlow is technical director and production supervisor. Jenny Slattery is associate producer. Davidson & Choi Publicity are publicists.

 I’ve seen La Cage Aux Folles as a Broadway National Tour, in two major regional productions, at a dinner theater, at a community theater, and in a 99-seat house, and though some were better than others, all of them combined hilarity and heart the way the show’s original creative team had attended.

I’m more than open to new interpretations of classic shows. (I was pretty much the only local reviewer to rave about Daniel Fish’s radically rethought Oklahoma! at the Ahmanson.)

And there’s no reason a La Cage Aux Folles revival needs to replicate what came before. (The 2012 National Tour survived a scaled-down cast and orchestra pretty much unscathed.)

And this isn’t the first time the Pasadena Playhouse has rethought a Broadway musical classic. (David Lee’s Ragtime and Mike Donahue’s Little Shop Of Horrors fiddled with the proven and came out winners.)

 Such is unfortunately not the case with La Cage Aux Folles. Though many audience members around me seemed to be lapping it all up, I for one was more than happy to bid this birdcage adieu.

Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena.
www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
November 17, 2024
Photos: Jeff Lorch

 

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