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With every cast change, this high-kicking, high-camp production of La Cage aux Folles just gets more confident, more risqué, raucous and ravishing.
This delicious French farce by Harvey Fiestein (book) and Jerry Herman (music and lyrics) is a happy portrait of a marriage. With a ticklish twist. The couple who run a nightclub just happen to be gay (Albin is a transvestite, Georges is 'plain' homosexual) and the gorgeous girls who pout and stut their stuff in spangled corsets trimmed with feathers just happen to be guys.
Philip Quast continues to twinkle as the man in this partnership; trucker-shaped Roger Allam steps into the frock part and sparkles. By day, he's the put-upon 'wife' whose proccupied 'husband' fails to turn up for dinner ('It's not the chicken. It's the thought behind the chicken,' he says, pulling off his Marigolds).
At night he bats away life's troubles with a pair of bumper-size eyelashes, pours his paunch into sequins and sings his girlie heart out as ZaZa, qwueen of the nightclub La Cage aux Folles.
However, in order to impress the prospective in-laws of Georges' son, Jean-Michel, the mincingly effeminate Albin is forced to masquerade as a man with a John Wayne walk and then, finally, required to be mumsy in houndstooth.
Grotesquely glamorous in his Dame Edna wigs and slightly sad and diminshed when reduced to being a mere man, Allam's performance is infinitely nuanced and fabulously funny.
More than that, in the show-stopping anthem of self-acceptance - 'Your life is a sham until you can shout, "I am what I am"' - he nearly makes you weep.
© Associated Newspapers Ltd
