La Cage Aux Folles-Original Production

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 6:43pm

I am writing a term paper for my queer theory class on La Cage Aux Folles and how it ultimately becomes a crowd-pleaser and avoids the politics of its plot. I am trying to find out the initial reaction to the original production from audience members as well as critics. The only reviews I can find online are reviews of the revival, but I am more interested in the historical context of the original production. If anyone could help me, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Posted: 3/6/06 at 6:55pm

I can't give you any historical perspective or overall audience reactions, but,
I can tell you that I went with my parents (old-fashioned Italians) :) ----and we all loved it! They enjoyed it so much that they requested to see it again and I gave them tickets for their anniversary later that year. It was great---George Hearn was amazing and so was Gene Barry!

[singtopher]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 7:03pm

You can get original reviews off of the New York Times website. I was able to find the original reviews for South Pacific for a paper I wrote.

[CurtainPullDowner]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 7:25pm

Well I remember auditioning for the Original, and not getting it but several of my friends did, and they were very excited cause this was gonna be a Big Deal for the Gay Rights movement,
Many of them had never put a dress on in their lives. (some had)
Some went on to become Drag Queens (some were straight)
The first time I saw the show I had to agree it it was a liberating experience and the "I AM WhatI Am" number was just amazing.
During the run of the show the AIDS Crisis went full blown and The Original cast did the first EASTER BONNET in the basement of the palace and started what would be a new tradition which continues to raise $ and bring the Theatre comunity together for a great cause.
A few of the Original Cast have passed away but a lot of them are still around and kicking.
Find them and get their views.


Updated On: 3/6/06 at 07:25 PM

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 7:44pm

Thanks so much for your help, guys. I have writer's block now, hopefully will get inspired soon enough. I think the show wasn't that helpful to the gay rights movement though, in my opinion, it depicts a very normalized view of homosexuals instead of portraying the real deal especially in the 80s, it avoided being political I believe. Thanks so much everyone.

[Flahooley]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 9:15pm

Hi.. I don't think that the power of the dramatic arts is society changing like a civil right movement...I think it changes things on a more subtle level:

I was a 13 year old little catholic gay boy when the first national tour of LA CAGE came to town. I didn't know what "gay" was really. But I bought tickets and my right wing baptist aunt and I went to see the show - I knew that it was something that she wouldn't approve of, but I didn't care - so I didn't tell what the show was about. I hardly knew myself!

Anyway, I sat in the theatre and the Cagelles came out. I tried not to turn my head to see my aunts reaction. I wasn't going to let her ruin the overwhelming excitement I was already sensing.
But, without knowing it, I found myself checking her out. She was smiling broader than I had ever seen her smile in my life. For the rest of the evening that old bitch was happier than I had ever seen her!!!

As for me, I had chills when Walter Charles (Zasa) sang I AM WHAT I AM. I almost started crying. I knew then and there what I really was, and that I should never be ashamed of it.

Now did LA CAGE bring about a sudden change immediate change in the public policies of the country? No. That is too much of a burden to place on a piece of art. That job is for the people of the society to do. What it did do, as least for me, was tell that I'm OK.

Today, I don't think LA CAGE is all that great a musical (craft-wise) but it did have a great impact on me. At the end of the show the audience was beating with one heart, cheering with one voice and deep sense of our common humanity was reached. You can't ask a piece of theatre to do any more than that.




Updated On: 3/6/06 at 09:15 PM

[jv92]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 9:42pm

Well, La Cage was very successful, as you know. Even the real conservatives loved it. Jerry Herman tells an interesting story about a couple he sat behind at the Boston tryout in his memoir.
One of the major reasons why its grosses began to drop later in its run was the death of Rock Hudson. On the day he died, a newschannel interviewed matinee ladies as they were leaving the Palace and asked them if they would see the show if AIDS could be transitted through the air. Of course, their response was no. People also began to think about homosexuality as a serious topic, and not as something frivolous and in the end, touching, as the show portrays it to be.

[CurtainPullDowner]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 10:27pm

ray
if u are writing yer thesis u are obviously a young pup and don't know what it was like to be Gay then and how much seeing anything than said we were somewhat normal was a big help.
I was already out but the message was Loud and Clear that we were gona be singing about it for a long time.
and the fact that AIDS was getting it's Day it was even a bigger deal than u think.
I feel the revival failed becaise it didn't do anything new or scarey (except men doing jump splits like that)

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 10:39pm

I am 19 years old and I'm only a junior in college so I wasn't around in 1983 when the show opened. However, my whole thesis about the show is that it avoids to be political, it eventually becomes a musical about two homosexuals that must sacrifice their own happiness for a heterosexual couple to come together, and at the end the gay people are only accepted by the heterosexuals (both in the audience and in the show) because they are there to help both the heterosexual engagement and the conservative man's reputation. I am basing this analysis of the show on Sarah Schulman's critique of Rent using the same framework. What I've heard about audience reactions on La Cage is that people just fell in love with the music, the spectacle, the love story, but no responses say that the show made the audience feel uncomfortable the way shows pivotal to the gay rights movement like Angels in America, Torch Song Trilogy, and A Chorus Line did. It's just my opinion and it may sound radical and obviously I wasn't there so I am just talking from readings and theoretical framework, but I think it's an interesting discussion to have and certainly a great topic for my paper.

Updated On: 3/6/06 at 10:39 PM

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 11:19pm

oh - ouch. I could go off on this thread...but I won't. Unless my blood really starts to boil. I can only say that I STRONGLY disagre shneb.

La Cage certainly does not avoid anything, it just doesnt go after the topic head on. It is the subtle storytelling in Harvey's book with his overt jokes that make the story so successful along with Herman's subtle score. Although it seems to be big, bold and flamboyant - its anything but. If you wanted to write an exact oppiosite thesis - id reccomend it. Only my personal opinion.

[frontrowcentre2]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 7:02am

I covered the original production (I was doing reviews for my wekly radio show then.)

On the plus side the show was properly glitzy, Jerry Herman's score was filled with the kids of songs he does best. (I thought "The Best of Times" would become his next standard. It almost did.) The cast especially George Hearn and Gene Barry were sensational.

The down side? A lot of cheap jokes and playing into stereotypes. For every time the show scored a point for showing gay men as thriving, three-dimensional characters it countered it by showing them as bitchy and shallow queens. Still, the the final scene love triumphs and the fact that it became a mainstream popular hit showed the nay-sayers that a story about two gay men (even though one was conveniently feminine and in drag most of the show) could be a popular mainstream success.

The show, contrary to myth, was not closed because of negative reaction to the AIDS crisis. It had simply run 4 years and was running out of audience. (Remember, the 1980s were BEFEORE the age when shows would habitually run 10 years or more. A 3-4 year run was considered a smash hit!)

[kooky]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 8:18am

Remembering the original production with Gene Barry - - I loved it so much, the
music and "Song of the Sand " I sang forever it seems - and still is one of my very
favorites. I remember not wanting to leave the theatre - - I felt so uplifted !
Gee, thanks for making me remember that all over again - - today will be a La Cage
song filled day !
Updated On: 3/7/06 at 08:18 AM

[philcrosby]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 10:44am

Also, let us not forget that the musical followed (and was based on) an extraordinarily successful foreign film that played markets that had never experienced gay-themed material before. The ground was already broken for a great many audiences.

But you cannot underestimate the impact of "I Am What I Am." It was the first-time a gay character on a mainstream stage declared that being gay was not only OK, but perhaps something to be valued and celebrated. Compare that to "The Boys in the Band"'s most most famous quote: "Show me a happy homosexual and I will show you a gay corpse." Quite a change in attitude -- and of audience acceptance in just a few years.

While the AIDS epidemic did not close LA CAGE by any means, it slowed dramatically the progress that had been made in gay rights up until that point -- the disease gave some ignorant souls the ammunition they had been looking for to try and shove us all back in the closet.

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:26pm

I wasn't around to see the original, but I familiarized myself with the script and CD at a young age, and did see the terrible revival last year.

I don't understand how this show is considered good, or how it won the Tony Awards that it did, especially over something like SUNDAY. Yes, it was the early 80's and it was "groudbreaking," but it's just such a cheap, shoddy musical that I can never get past the surface of it. I wish i could have seen the original, but atleast for now, I really don't have any sort of appreciation for the show.

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:46pm

John Simon's original review:

"The best way to enjoy LA CAGE AUX FOLLES is with earplugs. You can then see the luscious sets by David Mitchell, whose gliding, flying, gyrating is as thrilling as their design. You can see how Jules Fischer has lit them, making the waters of St. Tropez truly liquid, the sky above truly skyey. You can see the sumptuous and inventive costumes of Theoni V. Aldredge, tasteful even when they are conjuring up the outre. You can see, even without having to hear them, how good are the performances of Gene Barry, as Georges, the homosexual owner of the Cage aux Folles nightclub, and of George Hearn, as Albin, is lover and, under the name Zaza, the club's transvestite star. You could, unfortunately, not avoid seeing the rest of the cast or the strenuous but unrewarding choreography of Scott Salmon, but was there ever a perfect solution to anything?

And conveniently, earplugs are removable. For the three or four better songs Jerry Herman has written, you could take them out; for the others and for the reprises with which the show is awash, you could stick the plugs back in. You would certainly want to keep them in for the dialogue, whether it comes from the play by Jean Poiret (who also wrote the movie version) of whether it was contrived by Harvey Fierstein in what he may or may not percei e as the spirit of the original. I had precious little use for the film, but atleast it was authentically French rather than Brooklyn with a few nest-ce pas added, the points were made with a trowl rather than a sledgehammer, and the dinner scene was a genuine farce. It also had such find supporting actors as Michel Galabru as the girl's father.

I suppose there is no one left in America who doesn't know the story, and readers of this magazine recently had it rehearsed for them in Ross Wetzsteon's panegyric. It is, in its way, a remarkable concoction, cadging or coercing sympathy on various levels with the most meretricious premeditation. That homosexual relations are grossly oversimplified and sugarcoated in CAGE is no hanging matter; heterossexual relations have similiarly been falsified in muscals since year one - a very good year for cheap muscatel. But what we ave here is the something-specious-for-everybody mentality at its apogee. For the affluent, midd-class, middle-aged theatregoer there is a chance to feel wonderfully tolerant toward homosexuals, and tolerance is, of course, a good thing, though in this simplistic presentation it becomes really blindingly patronizing smugness. This adorable, happily married homosexual couple of their two decades' standing, and their sudden problem because "their" son is about to marry into a reactionary, anti-homosexual family (translation: Jewish into Christian or vice-versa, right into poor or vice versa, enlightenedly liveral into conventionally conservative or what have you), is the very stuff of which facile fiewer self-righteousness is made. After all, this is a homosexuality where drag merely means cute, marital fidelity between two men comes easy and lasts forever, and an S&M bullwhip is only a snappier kind of bongo drum.

For homosexuals, this, ever more than TORCH SONG TRILOGY, is the Broadway legitimization of their modus vivendi, all the way from respectable bourgeois to an outrageously transvestite, via a bidget of $5 million. That the homosexual couple is played by eminently heterosexual actors, that discrimination against them is represtned by paper mice (not even tigers), that Fierstein's (or perhaps Poiret's) values are seemingly no idifferent from Neil Simon's with one set of genitals changed, that if this were a musical based on the "thereatening" work of a gifted and candid homosexual such as Jean Genet or Djuna Barnes, there would be not standing ovations by the end of Act ! but a stampede for the exit does not trouble them at all. Frills, fantasy, factitiousness are there in abundance, and as these have worked for benighted heterosexuals, they'll work no less well for benighted homosexuals.

But there is worse: CAGE plays into the hands of homophobes. No "right-minded" antihomosexual (and which two-bit-fag-baiter doesn't consider himself rightminded?) would identify him- or herself with the heterosexual characters of this CAGE. Crude, stupid, unprepossessing - or, in the case of the young lovers, smarmy and untalented (John Weiner looks and acts like a TV weatherman from Albuquerque; Leslie Stevens is a five-and-ten-cent baby in a million-dollar store)- these people are no "us," say the sons and daughters of Anita Bryant as they march mulishly on.

But someone tells me, aren't you forgetting that this is only a musical - just entertainment? Well, as just entertainment it is fair to middling, as noted above. Arthur Laurents has directed with a mixture of obviousness and ingenuity (the latter, alas, often derived from sources as various as GYPSY and DREAMGIRLS); the sights are stunning and you can amuse yourself by following, not the predictable plot and feeble gags, but the itinerary across the stage of that $5 million, so well marshaled that you can see where every C-note went; and Barry and Hearn are truly accomplished and touching. The rest is as phony as the name of the tansvestite chorines at the club, Les Cagelles, which is about as French as "usherette."

However, the sanctimonious piety with which this show is being hailed, in standing ovartions, critical hossanas, bourgeois self-congratulation, and homosexual ecstasies - the first-act curtain number, "I Am What I Am," Albin's defiant self-ssertion as drag queen and surrogate mother to young Jean-Michel, is being touted as the new "gay anthem" - forces one to take it more seriously. I fully expect straight couples to wear the ticket stubs of CAGE as goody-goody-conduct medals on their chests. And take that "I Am What I Am": it is a fair enough show song, cleverly integrated into the plot, strategically positioned, and superlatively delivered by George hearn. Bt put it alongside the proud cocotte's chanson by Jacques Prevert and Joseph Kosma, "Je suis comme je suis" - which has been translated and adapted by Eric Bentley into the song of a 42nd Steet male hustler - and you can see the difference between true lyricism, honesty, art and a deftly posturing placebo.

Though considerable better than, say, Porky's, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES is equally beyong criticism; far be it from me to try to prevent its watered-down felicities from reaching their own leve. And, after all, CATS misrepresents felines, too"

[Calvin]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:50pm

John Simon's word on La Cage should be taken with the same grain of salt you would give a Pat Buchanan review of "The Last Night of Ballyhoo."

[philcrosby]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:51pm

I am not sure you CAN separate the impact of LA CAGE from its original production, produced at the time it was done. Just as BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is garnering huge praise for what should be just another tragic love story, LA CAGE is important for what it says about a moment in time, particularly as regards the gay rights movement. Even at the time, Fierstein's book got a fair amount of criticism for the mess that it is, but the production was buoyed by that happy Herman score, a taut and brilliant production directed by Arthur Laurents, and two truly star performances from both George Hearn and Gene Barry. Only Fierstein was self-identified in the public eye as gay at the time, and to have the others involved - gay and straight - was quite a coup at the time. When Zaza rips the wig off his head at the end of Act One and stormed up the aisle of the Palace Theatre, it was electric.

I saw both LA CAGE and SUNDAY in the same week ... in fact on successive nights. No question that SUNDAY is the better show. Though the audience at LA CAGE was laughing, crying and applauding wildly.

[grizzabella]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 2:03pm

ray-andall, I have to disagree somewhat with the premise of your paper, that La Cage avoided controversy or politics. In 1983, this was anything but the truth. Whether it still holds up over time as a statement is debateable, at least without some major changes in the book, but this was the first time that a major, Broadway musical even approached homosexuality and the gay culture as a dominant theme. At least, if there were any before then, I can't think of them. At the time, I recall it being considered quite ground-breaking, and the fact that it did so without sending a mainstream audience running out of the theatres, was a coup in itself. That it made people laugh, cheer and recognize all of our shared humanity, was part of its victory. Believe it or not, in 1983, "I Am What I Am" was a strong political statement.
Still, best of luck on your paper. It does sound quite interesting.

[eltenor]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 2:16pm

I worked merch for the revival and it was always one of my favorite shows to work. First of all, I might have been the only person on earth who truly loved the revival but I LOVED it. I watched it over and over again (because it was free and I could!). I sat in the back of the theatre every night and just fell in love with it over and over again. And talking with audiences was incredible. People came from all over the country and the world and saw this show and it touched them all. Most audience members loved it too. And on top of that I got a lot of people who came over and talked to me about seeing the original or being in it or being married to George Hearn (ok, just his wife) and how much the original meant to them. The show stands for so much than just what it actually shows or talks about and people get that and walk away with that. The original was obviously monumental and groundbreaking for its time but I think this production was incredibly important too. I'm not gay but it speaks to being a person and just basic human goodness and more sappy **** like that! I don't know, it really touched me and I saw it affect a lot of people.

[CurtainPullDowner]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 2:32pm

Well John Simon wrote your thesis already!
His review is part of the Propaganda of the heteros to over come the earth.
What a strange review he panders as much as he gripes about pandering.

[cheezedoodle]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 2:42pm

I was a Cagelle in the Lee Roy Reems tour, and I have to say it was one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had. I do agree that it changed people on a more personal and individual level - especially with the younger crowds that came to the show. There were many, many times that we were approached by both young men and women who were struggling with sexuality issues that shared their stories and then thanked us for making a niche of hope for them. It was truly amazing - not something anyone in the cast ever thought would happen. And you know - to this day, I can still tap out that opening number - that's how much of an impact it made on my life.