Inside The Risky First Out Of Town Preview of La Cage aux Folles in Boston

[Patti LuPone FANatic]

Posted: 6/24/19 at 8:23pm

As written by Arthur Laurents.  It's a fascinating article.   http://www.playbill.com/article/from-the-archives-inside-the-risky-first-out-of-town-preview-of-la-cage-aux-folles-that-put-a-gay-love-story-center-stage?fbclid=IwAR0oOBxw4odWpcc5zKmVWA0PtbhIv-Xbol80rSJkLV3mE27X3PXMdo3Y6zU

Updated On: 6/24/19 at 08:23 PM

[nmartin]

Posted: 6/24/19 at 9:23pm

Thanks for posting this. It took me back to the Palace Theatre and Gene Barry singing "Song on the Sand". I can still see and hear him. He was truly wonderful. 

[SherrieByTheSea]

Posted: 6/24/19 at 9:31pm

What a wonderful article. Oh, to have been in the audience that night 

[Someone in a Tree2]

Posted: 6/24/19 at 10:51pm

Love reading this memory of Arthur's, which matches pretty closely my own memories of premiering La Cage at the Colonial all the way to opening night at the Palace Theater in New York in August of 1983. That "David" that Arthur mentions in the first paragraph was of course the brilliant set designer David Mitchell of ANNIE and BARNUM fame who was about to premiere his very last smash hit on Broadway with this show.

You see, full disclosure, I was David Mitchell's first assistant set designer on LA CAGE. I know personally what it felt like to toss scenery piece after scenery piece into the alley behind the Colonial until the damn  thing would finally fit onstage. The main apartment set/backstage set was originally one giant turntable unit that was planned to rotate from one face to the other to get those onstage/offstage scenes to flow. It was Fritz Holt (our Production Stage Manager famous for wrangling FOLLIES 10 years earlier) who convinced everyone to just chop the set into two chunks and roll the apartment pieces on from the wings and fly the backstage wall up and down like every other set on Broadway at the time. But he was right-- it worked and it salvaged the run in Boston. (The entire apartment set was completely redesigned, rebuilt, and re-decorated by the time we came into New York a month later.)

Another travesty that ended up in the alley was an enormous Conference Room set in which Monsieur Dindon (the right-wing father in law) was introduced with perhaps the worst song Jerry Herman ever wrote-- a diatribe consisting of every horrible ethnic slur then known to man. Even before the first preview, out went the scene, out went the song, and along with it a very large set piece stored upstage center that freed up 7 or 8 feet of stage depth for the rest of the show.

The show was a trial by fire for me, a callow 27-year-old gay boy just starting out. Having to explain what wasn't working set-wise to Arthur (or Jerry Herman or Marvin Kraus) was as withering an experience as you can imagine. And frankly, though I loved the company of La Cage to death, even I  had some reservations about how old-school and traditional this pean to gay love was determined to be. But for 1983 it was a boundary busting show, and I couldn't be prouder to have been a part of the Original Broadway production, the 1st National Tour, 2nd National Tour and 1st Bus and truck productions.