The season’s other big cross-dressing musical is, uh, small. That’s the surprisingly appealing revival of La Cage aux Folles, Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s 1983 musical, adapted from the French movie from ... (Oh, not again. Can I skip this part?). I was in no hurry to see La Cage after the slick and empty Broadway revival of 2004. But this version, directed by Terry Johnson and imported from the Menier Chocolate Factory in the Southwark neighborhood, triumphs by being anti-slick.
Starring the sublime Roger Allam (in a part originated, to acclaim, by Douglas Hodge in this revival) and Philip Quast as the couple who run a tourist-friendly Riviera transvestite revue, this La Cage is sweet, seedy and affectingly human. The nightclub of the title is presented as a run-down joint, and its “girls” are very (very) obviously men beneath their feathers and bustiers. The discrepancy between aspiration and reality is always clear.
Allam, a strapping fellow who wears his dresses with sincerity, and Quast traffic charmingly in the old-style conventions of the British music hall and melodrama. They’re the most engaging old couple of tramps this side of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the West End Waiting for Godot.
The Menier, the big little theatrical powerhouse of the moment, is also responsible for the West End transfer of A Little Night Music, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Garrick Theater. (The Menier’s tiny, improbably fertile stage is currently home to a new West End edition of Gerard Alessandrini’s Forbidden Broadway, which offers delicious — and spot-on — spoofs of La Cage and Night Music.)
Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer’s Night, about love’s labors and losses, is a more obvious candidate for the bare-bones approach. Sondheim’s songs are introspective, and a mostly naked stage in a smallish theater allows audiences the feeling of eavesdropping on swirling thoughts set to three-quarter time.
Such a character-driven production is only as good as its cast, and the London performers are sometimes only adequate. (It is reportedly being recast, top to bottom, for its coming Broadway incarnation.) But when it works, it has a rueful and unusually specific emotional clarity.
When Hannah Waddingham — the tall, endearingly awkward actress playing the disorganized actress Desiree — sings Send In the Clowns, you feel privy to a private and privileged conversation. I wouldn’t swap those few quiet moments of song for three hours of dancing nuns or drag queens.
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