Redback Rocks in Frocks and Other Musicals

Todd McKenney is kissing Simon Burke (that’s new). Rhonda Burchmore is Rhonda Burchmore (that’s fun). Aljin Abella is short, chattering and nimble (a dizzy whirlwind across the stage). Gary Sweet is in a frock (born for the role). Jerry Herman’s La Cage aux Folles, the Grand Drag musical about the family problems of a St Tropez gay couple, hasn’t been on a professional stage in Australia since 1985 when Keith Michell played Georges (the straight-acting one), and Jon Ewing, Albin (the drag diva). This time, at Melbourne Arts Centre, it’s McKenney as Albin and Simon Burke as Georges.

In the mid-1980s La Cage was the wrong gay play at plague time. When the matinee ladies saw AIDS on the television news and their hairdressers died they stopped humming “The best of times is now … Tomorrow is too far away”. Along Broadway, Mark Steyn saw the removal vans, and hearses: “Fags weren’t funny any more; fags meant disease and death. One minute La Cage aux Folles was the biggest homegrown hit of the day; the next it was gone.”

La Cage has made a comeback and been adding its glitz to international stages since the early 2000s. This time it’s a vehicle for celebrity gay performers. A million years ago the joke was that Albin, the screaming lead, was not meant to be gay in private life; now the flamboyant, camp role is the property of never-been-in-the-closet performers like John Barrowman and Graham Norton. “As for tomorrow, well, who knows?” says the song. AIDS yesterday, tomorrow Islam—maybe.

Beside the Yarra, La Cage plays in a typically lean Production Company version which strips away the inessential and polishes the essential. It’s a skilful treatment that makes old and new musicals shine. With minimal sets, quality costumes, imaginative staging, Orchestra Victoria onstage with the actors, big-name leads and talented young performers, the package made a glittery Christmas treat.

The first-night audience had free champagne and Magnums at interval—courtesy Mrs Production Company Chairman Jeanne Pratt. I wish I’d had what they had. The headline of the Fairfax review was “La Cage aux Folles uncages wonderful wit of Simon Burke and Todd McKenney”. McKenney, the bitchy judge at the end of the row on Dancing with the Stars, totters down from the stage on high heels and throws lumpy insults in the direction of an elderly lady. The audience laughs. From behind me, far back in the dress circle, a plump female voice screams out: “I love you Todd.” McKenney is as cuddly as a redback. He returns the affection with a poisonous love bite, “F*** you. This is my show and I’ll do what I want to do.” True, and the audience laughs, but the performer has escaped director Dean Bryant’s control and gone from Jerry Herman camp to Christmas panto bawdy.

The onstage stars don’t appear to believe we should be taking any of this too seriously, it’s their celebrity we are here to admire. The showstopper, “I Am What I Am”, doesn’t come across with the expected bang. YouTube is our universal memory—if it’s not on YouTube it never happened. Scratch about and you will find a poorly recorded video, hard sometimes to hear, of Jon Ewing singing that song in the original Australian production. It’s a moment of real musical theatre. A genuine man’s voice, broken and ageing (he was fifty at the time), elbows out of the song and touches far more than this cheerful light-headed performance. The voice from the past had found inside the usual Jerry Herman schmaltz something real and brave, and guaranteed to leave the elderly matinee ladies not shocked but applauding. It’s not brave any more—it’s rather safe except if you are standing outside the Lakemba mosque. It has also become a song cut loose from genuine meaning—as Gloria Gaynor so memorably demonstrated.

This gay mainstream musical is built on very un-gay foundations. Jean Poiret’s 1973 play, which the film and this musical are based on, celebrated his twenty-year relationship with Michel Serrault—a writing and acting partnership. They played the leads in the stage production and Serrault carried on the role into the later film. At first in Paris the play—the title translates as The Cage of Poofs—attracted gay hostility before the laughter took over. YouTube snippets of their live performance suggest it was to gay life what black-and-white minstrels were to Black American life. In the beginning, it was a money-making, heterosexual farce about homosexuals—perhaps influenced by Charles Dyer’s earlier play Staircase, which had brought an older gay couple onstage.

Reworking the material for his musical in 1983, Jerry Herman ignored the brash and deliberately confronting sexual politics of the 1970s and early 1980s. He added tunes, frocks and sentimentality and made his screaming queen Albin as inoffensive, touching and extravagant as his Mame and Dolly had been. And all was well until AIDS did a cutaway to reveal other aspects to gay experience.

Audiences have forgotten the disease, which has not gone away. The fluffy musical fantasy tells of two gay St Tropez drag cabaret owners dealing with their son’s proposed marriage to the daughter of a conservative politician, played by Gary Sweet—who ends up donning a frock and joining the chorus line. What was once a soft-edged appeal for acceptance and tolerance from mainstream audiences is now considered to be saying something serious about gay marriage and families, and evil conservatives. If Poiret’s play had been seen as advocating same-sex marriage in 1973, the theatre would have been burnt down—by gay-rights activists protesting against a play, written and acted by heterosexuals, which was imposing heterosexual conventions of monogamy on free-loving, free-living, sexual outlaws.

The villainous Monsieur Dindon (Gary Sweet), who gets his spangles-and-lace comeuppance, is a fairy-tale conservative French politician. Real-life Georges and Albin might not share the Left politics that dull playwrights distribute to minorities they approve of. They also might not be very impressed with gay marriage, and as caring employers it will fall on them to deal with the tears of distraught drag queens who suddenly realise that a white wedding at the Mairie doesn’t come with a thirty-day free trial and a cancel-anytime monthly contract.

The musical’s cartoonish anti-Right politics have dated badly. French gays are more likely to get a date by joining the National Front than by clicking into Craigslist. A co-founder of French Gaylib made headlines when he quit Sarkozy’s UMP to join the National Front, and the party’s deputy leader, Florian Philippot, was outed by a gossip magazine. As well, several high-profile party staffers have posed for gay magazines and raunchy underwear ads. Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen the National Front has gone blue, white and pink. There was some amusement when the winner of a Mister Gay 2015 competition, conducted by a leading homosexual magazine, was revealed to be a National Front supporter—but the more interesting thing is that the magazine readers knew this when they voted for him. The Left editors of the publication, chests weighed down by Je suis Charlie badges, are changing the rules so that such an embarrassment won’t happen again. The young man himself replied to their criticism saying that he is a person, not just a sexual orientation.

In between the enjoyable song-and-dance routines and the energetic dancing Cagelles, the dialogue and story of La Cage have also aged. Harvey Fierstein’s early 1980s text needs a facelift. A few pricks of reality might help. A start would be to drop the old right-wing politician and welcome a topical new villain. This might work. When son of gay parents wants to marry pretty girl she turns out to be the daughter of local imam. But perhaps matinee ladies, unfazed by two men kissing on stage, might not be ready for the first headless Jerry Herman musical. Just give them time, they’ll come around.

Another day, another musical.

We’re into Act 2 of a Great Big Award Winning British Musical—when performed in Australia it won Helpmann Awards in 2008 and now it’s back in a shiny new DVD case. Onstage it’s the Christmas scene, and a concert is taking place. There are colourful costumes and lots of jokes before the main song is uncorked. It’s classy material with music by Sir Elton John and words by Lee Hall (who also wrote War Horse): “Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher / We all celebrate today / ’Cause it’s one day closer to your death”. This goes on for some time with puppets and masks and funny business all around until a group of pretty and very young girls in white frocks and butterfly wings come downstage for the final chorus: “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Heseltine / You’re a tosser, you’re a tosser / And you’re just a Tory swine”.

Billy Elliot: The Musical is set during the British miners’ strike in the mid-1980s. That song has become a popular school concert performance—see any of the many school performances uploaded to YouTube.

The London production was playing on the day Margaret Thatcher died. Before the performance the audience was asked to vote on whether the song should be performed or not. In the 1400-seat theatre the yelling and cheering audience took part with enthusiasm: only three people voted no.

The worst thing, of course, is that it is exciting, moving and enjoyable musical theatre. This performance was recorded with the 2014 cast at London’s Victoria Palace Theatre. Elliott Hanna as young Billy and Ruthie Henshall as Mrs Wilkinson are standouts.

Also new in a box is a DVD of a new Tim Rice musical, From Here to Eternity. The packaging is splattered with four- and five-star review symbols. Don’t believe them—the musical had a short run. Stay-away audiences (un-audiences?) showed more discernment than the newspaper critics. It’s a traditional book musical from a badly chosen novel. Very sexy, very realistic, very violent, and very boring. It’s a Model T Ford with a tank full of lead-free fuel which stalls onstage. I’m looking for the video stop button long before the Zeros hit Pearl Harbor.

For more theatre without leaving home there is something new. On YouTube, which a new and simply installed attachment allows me to watch on television, are some interesting French “musical spectacles”. It’s a genre of popular theatre which would be worth importing and naturalising, or rebranding and exporting to the huge English-speaking market.

Director’s theatre in Australia encourages over-indulged egos with under-developed talent to destroy classical works by rewriting texts and burying actors under irrelevant show-off flourishes. French “musical spectacles” are a choreographer’s theatre which creates popular entertainment with newly written words and music, vivid dance routines, and theatrical effects. With a big stage, a big cast and big ideas the results can be stunning.

One of the major names in the French productions I’ve been watching is choreographer and director Kamel Ouali. Child of the banlieue, he was born in Paris to Kabyle Algerian parents. He fortunately missed drama school education and was a dancer and choreographer who became well known as the choreographer on the popular television series Star Academy.

There are a range of his shows on YouTube. The story lines are fairly clear and you don’t need a common language to enjoy the production. In Cleopatra the applause when a young Caesar appears is for Chris Stills, an actor and musician descended from the middle bit of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Other Ouali productions have dealt with Dracula, the Sun King, and the French Revolution—the last ends with an emotional reading from The Rights of Man. Autant en emporte le vent (Gone with the Wind) is also worth tasting. In the beginning, Tara is a gorgeous southern Watteau, a frozen stage painting which comes to life as we watch. The familiar story plays out with rapid changes of scene and fast-moving action, though unfortunately without the film music. Atlanta burns nicely and even without a word of French it’s easy to pick who’s who and impossible to miss “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”