La Cage Aux Folles at Pasadena Playhouse

 Less than a week before I saw La Cage aux Folles at the Pasadena Playhouse, I went on a school retreat that focused on reflecting on the four types of love as outlined by C.S. Lewis: storge (family love), philia (friendship love), eros (romantic love,) and agape (love for a higher being or calling.) While watching La Cage, I couldn’t help but think about the similarities between the themes of the play and the retreat I had gone on. The two primarily overlapped in emphasis on the importance of having the different types of love in one’s life, and how the purpose of human life is not to simply be an individual but to seek out people who make you feel complete. I think the type of love most present in La Cage are storge (family love) and eros (romantic love). Love is the catalyst for all the events in the musical as it pushes and pulls through the story which goes as such: a married couple, Georges and Albin are the proprietors of a drag club, La Cage aux Folles, on the French riviera. Georges is the club’s MC and director, while Albin is the main drag performer in the club’s nightly cabaret. When Georges’s son Jean-Michel returns from traveling, he announces that he is engaged to a woman called Anne and her parents are coming to visit. As it figures, Anne’s father, Deputy Dindon, is a conservative politician seeking to close down drag clubs, such as La Cage. Trouble arises when Jean-Michel tells Georges that Anne’s parents are under the impression that Georges is a retired diplomat married to Jean-Michel’s absent mother, Sybil. He asks Georges to send Albin away and invite Sybil during the visit so the Dindons can be led to believe Jean-Michel has respectable, heterosexual parents. Georges reluctantly agrees and informs Alban of the plan. Act one culminates in a song, “I Am What I Am," where Albin expresses the hurt he feels by being deliberately excluded from Jean-Michel’s wedding plans. The second act opens with Albin and Georges reuniting on the beach following Alban’s overnight absence. They agree that Albin can attend dinner with the Dindons if he attends as Jean-Michel’s macho Uncle Al. A song follows where Georges instructs Albin on how to correctly perform masculinity and come across as straight. Things begin to fall apart on the night of the dinner when Sybil abruptly cancels and Albin gets spooked right before the Dindons arrive. Georges and Jean-Michel frantically (and hilariously) try to make the situation seem normal until Albin arrives in drag as Jean Michel’s mother. After the butler Jacob fails to prepare dinner, Albin secures a table at a sought after restaurant, Chez Jacqueline, and the party goes to dinner. At Chez Jacqueline, the owner of the restaurant asks Albin for a song and everyone (omitting Deputy Dindon) sings and dances to “The Best of Times” until Albin’s wig gets snatched at the crescendo of the song. After traveling back to Georges and Albin’s home, a horrified Deputy Dindon asks for Anne to not marry Jean-Michel. She doesn’t listen to him, and Dindon and his wife try to leave. Their exit is stopped when they realize there is a crowd of photographers outside of La Cage aux Folles making it impossible to leave without having a picture of himself taken at an establishment his platform seeks to close down. Georges offers to help Dindon escape; he gives his blessing to Anne and Jean-Michel’s marriage. Dindon agrees, and the show culminates in a number where all the Dindons escape by discussing themselves as drag performers at La Cage. 

     The score, by Jerry Herman, helps guide and clarify the story’s dynamic, ever- fluctuating tone. Harvey Fierstein’s dialogue and narrative are filled with a potent concoction of tenderness and wit. Every production of La Cage should benefit from a strong foundation that is ripe to be built upon, and build the Pasadena Playhouse did. The entire production is a kaleidoscope of dazzling colors and textures. There is a bounty of bird references from the plastic flamingos and ducks, to feather covered, bird inspired costumes worn by the Cagelles, to the massive wooden flamingo suspended in the set’s background. I felt as though the costuming and set design fully embraced the show’s camp aesthetic, from the fluorescent color palette to the distinct outfits of every Cagelle (the show’s ensemble of drag performers). A detail that I think adds greatly to the emsebles’s stage presence is that professional drag performers were cast for the Cagelles.

      As far as the performances go, Georges, played by Cheyenne Jackson, and Albin, played by Kevin Cahoon, give strong performances that anchor the show’s supporting characters. Jackson shows off his impressive vocal chops during Song on the Sand where his melodic tenor manages to convey both the sincerity and power of the song. Cahoon's performance as Albin has brought a mixture of humor, frenetic energy, camp, and sincerity that made the character highly enjoyable to watch, and I found the moments when Albin is in drag to be some of the high points of the show.  And although I generally have a less is more attitude towards my judgment of performances, I’m a total sucker for melodrama and boy does this production deliver. Albin and Georges’s odd couple dynamic is… dynamic. The way that Georges and Albin carry on is humorous, but the characters feel more fleshed out than mere caricatures. The affection between the characters is palpable and it helps the audience understand why Albin is willing to change himself, albeit temporarily, to satisfy his partner and son. 

    I went into La Cage without much prior knowledge of the story with my only exposure being when I saw The Birdcage, a film adaptation of La Cage, playing on cable when I was 8 or 9. So after seeing the show I did some research on it to get a bit of background on La Cage. Significant of my findings, La Cage aux Folles was one of the first musicals about queer characters to succeed on Broadway. And although the dichotomy of good and bad representation is often over simplified in many discussions, La Cage is decidedly good queer representation as it is still, 40 years later, one of the few mainstream musicals to center around a queer couple who are in a healthy, long term relationship. It is a challenge to perform or adapt any beloved piece of media, but especially media that has as much significance as La Cage has to the queer community. After reflecting on the show’s context, I came to admire how La Cage Aux Folles at the Pasadena Playhouse respects the material while also offering up their own distinct interpretation of the story. I ended up buying a t- shirt at the merch stand that read “I had the best of times at La Cage,” and that just about sums up my experience of seeing La Cage Aux Folles at the Pasadena Playhouse.