Hear Me Talkin' To You: "LA CAGE AUX FOLLES" at Encores!
When I heard that Encores! was going to revive La Cage au Folles to conclude its 2026 season, I thought (I confess): Why on earth, why? We need something right now way more confrontational than that period piece.
As usual, I was wrong.
Written in 1973 by the French playwright Jean Poiret, La Cage au Folles is a boulevard farce with a queer couple at its heart — a fabulous drag queen chanteuse named Albin, and Georges, owner of the St. Tropez nightclub where she stars.
La Cage has always creaked with a warm lascivious tilt of the conventional in the name of cultural revolution. Remade as a Broadway musical in the dire age of AIDS, in 1983, by the sublimely conventional composer-lyricist Jerry Herman, with a shrewdly subversive book by the inimitably queer Harvey Fierstein, La Cage au Folles emerged as a cry of unapologetic queer identity in the face of annihilation.
Two subsequent revivals, in 2004 and 2010, each won Tony Awards in celebration of queer performative values that had come to feel increasingly quaint; men in glamorous drag… kissing! The defiant desperation underlying the original production — men in and out of drag were dying in droves! — had given way to a moment of relative calm, as antiretroviral drug cocktails seemingly licked AIDS, alongside All-American acceptance of homosexuality in the personhood of Will and Grace.
The war was over. La Cage au Folles could resist in peace.
Ha!
Things, as we all know, have since gone from gay to worse. What the hell, I wondered, was La Cage au Folles gonna do about it?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. In what now constitutes far more than just a welcome trend at Encores!, La Cage au Folles was revived with an all-Black cast, led by a fierce Billy Porter, who, with soul and sass, restored a sense of infuriated rage and wit to a show that always possessed these qualities covertly but now, at Encores!, overtly burned.
Preeminently, though, the reinvigorating vitality of this Encores! production resided in the infinite variety of its nightclub chorines — “Les Cagelles” — here presented not as a uniform kick line in matching Rockettes chic, but as a divinely mismatched community brazenly broadcasting their queer individuality in costumes (by Clint Ramos and Michelle Ridley) and kinks as varicolored as (yes) a rainbow.
They brought grit to La Cage and a transgressive flamboyance borrowed from (and inspired by) NYC’s Black, Latino, queer and transgender 80’s “ballroom” scene so vividly documented in the 1990 film Paris is Burning (yes, which underpins similarly Broadway’s current Cats: The Jellicle Ball).
La Cage has always been, at its heart, a hymn to domesticity. The Les Cagelles of this Encores! production goosed that hymn deliriously. They framed Albin and Georges (a deft Wayne Brady) in a milieu, not of mere naughtiness, but of lustrous civil disobedience. The difference was intoxicating.
Jerry Herman’s score resounded smashingly, reunited with its original orchestrations (by Jim Tyler) for the first time since the original Broadway production, and played with such sizzle by the Encores orchestra led by Joseph Joubert. Albin’s legendarily show-stopping “I Am What I Am,” felt, to me, almost beside the point here in the multi-colored radiance of director Robert O’Hara’s rejuvenating racial stage vision. The opulence of Les Cagelles in all their finery outshone the show-bizzy pronouncement: “I Am What I Am.” ‘But you knew that already!’ this La Cage seemed to say. ‘Now deal with it.’