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(The following review was part of an article concerning also other recent London openings)
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Or maybe this particular musical’s best option is to wait a decade or two so it can be revived in triumph at an Off West End theater and transfer from there to mainstream glory. That’s the path that has been traveled by La Cage Aux Folles, the gay-themed American musical whose original West End production did a fast fade from the London Palladium several years after its 1983 Broadway premiere. The Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein collaboration returned in a deliberately scrappy, pared-down staging from the writer/director Terry Johnson at south London’s Menier Chocolate Factory in December, 2007, in which its then-star, Douglas Hodge, gave a performance at once thrillingly stylized and emotionally fierce.
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The current Zaza, the two-time Olivier Award winner Roger Allam, has done musicals before, notably appearing as the very first Javert a quarter-century ago in Les Misérables, back in the days when he was a mainstay of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Playing an easily aggrieved entertainer in a Saint-Tropez nightclub belonging to his longtime lover, Georges (Philip Quast), Mr. Allam acts the role from the inside out, making the silences land just as readily as the powerhouse anthem ('I Am What I Am') from Mr. Herman, the Broadway composer, that closes the first act.
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But it’s the sense of a naturally effusive self kept on some level in check that lifts the performance beyond an extravagant curiosity: the concern for a young man who, in Stuart Neal’s absurdly clenched, petulant performance, doesn’t begin to merit the compassion of a professional transvestite who has indeed been Jean-Michel’s mother in everything but fact. And as Albin’s clearly long-suffering yet just as evidently devoted Georges, Mr. Quast more than fulfills his half of the human equation at the show’s strongly beating heart.
© The New York Times Company
