Culture > Sealed with a Kiss

"Sealed with a Kiss"
By Ed Huyck
Posted February 10, 2005

It ends with a kiss.

That doesn’t sound too revolutionary. After all, romances on stage and screen have consummated with kisses for ages. The evil doers have been vanquished. The plot has been solved. The roadblocks are gone. Lovers kiss. Curtain drops.

Ah. There’s a difference this time.

The lovers fight obstacles, both from within and without. They rediscover what brought them together in the first place. As the show ends. They share a kiss, one that lasts -- at least -- until the curtain has dropped.

The difference? This time the lovers are two men: Georges and Albin, the longtime partners at the center of “La Cage aux Folles,” the musical version of which is now playing at the Marquis Theatre on Broadway (website: www.lacage.com).

Somehow, you would think that the time for “La Cage aux Folles” would have passed. The original French farce is 30 years old, the original film more than a quarter century in the past, while the musical debuted on Broadway more than 20 years ago. By the time the material made it to most American viewers, via 1996’s “The Birdcage,” the story seemed to sit somewhere between quaint and condescending.

Yet if the past election season, not to mention the general tenor of the country, proved anything, is that there’s a message here that still needs to be told.

If you’ve missed any of the versions, here’s a quick recap. Georges runs a nightclub of the title in St. Tropez, France. The star of the show is Albin, who performs in drag as Zaza. The two have also been together for a quarter century.

That relationship is put to the test by Georges’ son, Jean-Michel, who has been raised by the pair. Jean-Michel comes on a visit with good news and bad. The good news is that he’s getting married. The bad news is that his bride-to-be’s father is a conservative politician who wants to close clubs like “La Cage” down. The real bad news is that Jean-Michel wants his parents to pretend to be something they are not. In George’s case, that’s being a heterosexual. For Albin, that means just being gone.

The details from here aren’t important, except to say the situation puts considerable strain on Georges, Albin and their relationship. Out of that comes comedy, great music and a beguiling love story.

I earn part of my living as a theater critic. In fact I was in New York for a meeting of the American Theatre Critics Association. Because of that, I usually have to balance my enjoyment (or dislike) of a show with an analytic eye to the performances, the staging and all the other pieces that go into making an evening at the theater work, or not work.

Even when I’m not on duty, it’s tough to turn that off -- to bridge the distance between the theater lover and the theater writer.

Maybe it was the distance from home and my job. Or maybe it was being in a more open environment, seemingly far from the place that saw a hate crime this summer and where “gay” is used as a general put down and “fag” seems to serve as punctuation.

Whatever the reason, on that Saturday night in New York City, I left the analytic behind and once again just became a theater lover.

Some of that was the staging, the choreography and the amazing talents of “Les Cagelles,” the all-male cross-dressing chorus that introduce questions of gender identity from their first, very masculine note. There are the efforts of the supporting cast, who breeze along through the play, creating a fiction that is so much more enticing than reality.

And much of the joy comes from the performances of the two leads: on this night Bryan Batt as Albin (the regular performer, Gary Beach, is off making “The Producers”), and Daniel Davis (TV fans may remember him as the butler Niles on “The Nanny“), who makes you believe he has been Georges his entire life.

And there’s the music and lyrics by Jerry Herman and the script by Harvey Firestein, who took the rather silly source material and molded it to their own experiences, expectations and dreams and crafted an evening dedicated to love -- in this case, centered on the love between two men.

You probably know Albin’s featured songs: the act-one call to arms “I Am What I Am,” and the celebratory “The Best of Times.” But the show truly turns on George’s songs of romance -- “With You On My Arms” and “Song on the Sand” -- and of purse love (“Look Over There”).

Which brings me back to the kiss. Often in theater, events happen merely because they are supposed to happen. There is no real tension along the way until you get to the inevitable happy ending. Here, due to the score and script, the staging and, especially, the performances from Davis and Batt, the moment is not staged. It is earned.

When “La Cage aux Folles” first played Broadway in the early 1980s, it broke new ground in subject matter -- celebrating gay relationships and lives in a way no mainstream work had done before. It also reached an audience, running for more than 1,500 performances on the Great White Way

.But then Georges and Albin never kissed. At the end of the show, they walked arm in arm into the St. Tropez sunset. A sweet ending, sure, but not the one that is needed. When Herman and Fierstein made revisions for the revival, they also put in the final kiss.

And, despite some reported grumblings (worried about offending red-state visitors perhaps?), the kiss remains. Two men, who above everything else, have dedicated their lives to one another, take a moment to soak up all that is around them, get to share a moment of bliss in the sun. And we, gay certainly and staright I would think as well, get to share it with them.

What more could we ask?

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Ed Huyck is a Positive Voice board member and a freelance writer living in Door County.

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