Word: cage
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...Cage aux Folles (literally "Cage of Crazies"; in French slang, "Cage of Gays") is based on Jean Poiret's farce of the same title, which ran in Paris from 1973 to 1980; and it resembles the film starring Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault, which became the most successful foreign-language movie ever shown in the U.S., grossing more than $40 million...
...Cage aux Folles is a Saint-Tropez drag club run by Georges. Its star performer is the incredible Zaza, who, when he takes off his dress and wig, is also Albin, Georges's lover for 20 years. Years ago, just to see what all the heterosexual fuss was about, Georges (Gene Barry) spent a few hours of passion with a showgirl. From that brief union came a son, Jean-Michel, who has lived ever since with Georges and Albin (George Hearn) in an apartment next door to La Cage...
...simultaneously putting on makeup, as he must do in his first number, and he had trouble walking down stairs like a woman. Almost as bad were the jokes he had to endure. Friends sent him lingerie ads, and Lauren Bacall told him that when he was done with La Cage, he could take over in Woman of the Year...
...wonder as well. "You'll find it tough guessing our gender," they sing at the beginning, and half the fun is telling one sex from the other. David Engel, for example, was a football player in the film of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. In La Cage he is Hanna from Hamburg, a blond beauty with a taste for sadomasochism. "A stagehand in Boston saw me in my wig, leotards and whip," says Engel, "and said, 'Honey, you can whip me any time...
Unfortunately, La Cage is not always up to the level of its best performances or its best moments. Herman's music is better-than-average Broadway fare, hummable and with a simple, insistent beat. But his lyrics are often trite and vulgar. "Look under our glitz, muscles and tits," he writes in one song. Fierstein's book is sometimes forced; the campy scenes with the black maid/butler (William Thomas Jr.) quickly become tedious, for example Arthur Laurents' direction is occasionally jarringly awry, as when he has the mother of Jean-Michel's fiancee do a degrading...