THE MUSICALS THAT MADE ME #4 - La Cage Aux Folles
On being seen. And being enough.
The radio is playing loudly, covering the noise of the printing presses. There is a little boy on the factory floor. He is having fun, enjoying being out with his Daddy, seeing where Daddy works. He’s a quiet little thing, shy around strangers, more expressive with his family. When he feels safe he dances, his feet light, his movement fluid. He skips between the heavy machinery, moving in time to the music, a teddy bear trailing from his hand. His big brother follows, trying to make him slow down. A man, burly, tall, his face lightly sheened with sweat, bars their way. The boys stop, look up. “Your Dad says one of you’s a bit of a fairy. Which one is it?” His brother points, “Him.”
He cannot hear the music anymore, only the sound of blood rushing in his ears, deafening, drowning out everything else. This is the moment. The moment he realises that not only is he different but that other people have noticed it too. Enough to comment on. In this moment he recognises his father, and his brother, and this man in his father’s workplace: they are not fairies. And he understands that whatever they have that connects them and makes them the same, he does not have. And he never will. In this same moment he realises neither is he the same as his mother or his sister, and he feels, suddenly, joltingly, set apart from them all. From everyone. In this moment he understands: whatever he is, he makes everyone around him feel uncomfortable.
Memories like this do not return as fact but as truth. We filter our memories through what survives: a photograph, newspaper clippings, a vinyl record.
When the music returns, he hears it privately, mediated through speakers, pressed into vinyl. A needle drops.
Every Sunday, after Mass, my parents would buy The Mail on Sunday and The News of the World. I loved the brightly coloured magazine supplements, loud and brash and gossipy. I would take them to my room, close the door, and pore over them.
One spring, 1986, for weeks the magazines were full of the most beautiful people I had ever seen in my life. They were called the Cagelles and the magazines devoted page after page to them, offering advice on how to copy their make-up, how to imitate their walk, how to dress like them. They were gorgeous, exotic creatures. London, the magazines proclaimed, was Crazy for the Cagelles. It was all publicity for a new musical coming to the West End, La Cage aux Folles. This was a musical I knew already. My father had the Broadway cast recording on double vinyl and, if I promised to be careful, he would let me listen to it on the record player in my bedroom. I knew, from the recording, that not all the Cagelles were women, some were men. The magazines asked readers to try and guess which were which. It was confusing. The recording sounded like a traditional musical but the main story wasn’t about a boy trying to get the girl, it was about two men who were already together, and somehow they were already a family. And, where the musicals I was familiar with clearly established family as the apex of respectability, in this there was another family, and one was wrong and one was right and I didn’t understand why the right one was wrong and the wrong one was right.
Growing up, musicals were about the only interest I shared with my father. I tried to go to football matches with him, I tried to enjoy church; at both I was cold and bored. But musicals, we shared. My love of musicals comes directly from him and his collection of cast recordings. If he had the opportunities I had, perhaps his life would have been different. Instead of gigging around the UK in working-mens clubs and variety halls, he might have gone into musical theatre. Dad was my first musical theatre tutor, my first singing teacher.
Sometimes Dad would take me to Blanks, the music shop on the Kilburn High Road, to buy vocal selection books and, if they didn’t have the one I wanted, he would take me into the West End and show me how to ask for sheet music at Foyles, or leave me browsing the selection at Chappell of Bond Street while he picked out melodies on one of the baby grand pianos on the shop floor. Those are the better memories.
There’s a photograph of me and Dad, taken one summer on a family holiday in St. Tropez. We had all gone for a walk one evening. I remember a long, stony path leading up a hill. My Dad and sister were walking on ahead, my mother and brother trailing behind. I was, as usual, wandering alone, somewhere in-between. We came to a wall. The lights of the Riviera twinkled in the distance below and beyond and Dad hoisted me up to sit on the wall so I could look down. My mother called, “Say cheese!” and Dad and I squinted at the camera.
I look awkward and uncomfortable in this picture. Dad’s hand rests on the middle of my back so I don’t fall backwards. It looks like he is both pulling me in close and holding me at a distance. My father is young and handsome in this photograph, his tan gleaming against a light-coloured shirt, his thick auburn hair dark in the evening light. Only years later did I learn he wore a wig.
La Cage aux Folles is set in St. Tropez. It opened at the London Palladium in May 1986 with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman and book by Harvey Fierstein. We were going to go and see it in the West End and then we weren’t and no-one told me why. It closed in January 1987 after just 301 performances.
In January 1987 a leaflet came through every letterbox in the United Kingdom. The front bore the message AIDS: Don’t Die Of Ignorance in thick white block text against a black background, while on television, John Hurt’s funereal voice spoke over disembodied hands carving the word AIDS onto a giant monolith. I hid the leaflet in my bedroom.
“Here we are at the pride of St. Tropez, the envy of the cabaret world, the jewel of the Riviera…” Georges, the suave and genial host, appears downstage and addresses the audience, welcoming them and promising an extravaganza, a night of delight and pleasure. “I beg you,” he exhorts, “open your eyes.”
That La Cage aux Folles is confusing is deliberate. It’s not just that the opening number explicitly states it, “we love how it feels, putting on heels, causing confusion,” it’s that, in copying the mechanics of a farce, the show is structurally designed to confuse. Jean Poiret’s play, La Cage aux Folles, is a French farce which opened in 1973 (the same year I was born) at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal and ran for more than four years. As in all farces, the play employs misdirection as a structural mechanism: misdirection of attention, information, interpretation. Misdirection techniques are speed, spectacle, repetition, or trivial detail to prevent characters (and sometimes audiences) from recognising the truth until the last possible moment.
Musicals, of course, are well-versed in misdirection, sneaking social commentary behind a showtune, trading unease for a tap shuffle. La Cage aux Folles employs the traditional structures of farce and musical theatre, to disguise its subversion.
From the opening introduction, La Cage aux Folles practices misdirection. Opening your eyes will not be enough. To understand La Cage requires more: the audience, and the characters on stage, must open their hearts.
Having introduced the Cagelles and established the world of the musical, we meet Albin in his dressing room as he is transforming himself into Zsa Zsa, the drag star of the cabaret. Following the traditional structure of a Golden Age book musical, his song, A Little More Mascara, occupies the space where a main character articulates their desire, the moment which, in later musicals, is codified as the ‘I Want’ song.
Yet even while following this traditional structure, A Little More Mascara is, once again, a misdirect. We can read it as Albin transforming into a gorgeous, charismatic creature in a world where “everything is ravishing, sensuous, fabulous,” but to do so overlooks that the transformation is necessary to make Albin’s depression disappear. That in order to achieve the transformation, he must ensure “Albin is tucked away.” In drag parlance, ‘tucking’ refers to the act of tucking male genitals away. To present Zsa Zsa to audience, Albin must accept an erasure of himself.
That self-erasure is something that gay men in the mid 1980s, when La Cage aux Folles premiered on Broadway and in the West End, would have been familiar with. Visibility came with consequences. There were material risks: housing, employment, personal safety. To be out as gay was to be exposed to judgement. And, at the height of the AIDS crisis, to be visibly gay was to be a pariah. Safer, perhaps, to hide away.
At the end of Act One Georges and his son, Jean-Michel, tell Albin that, in order for Jean-Michel to be accepted by his fiancee’s conservative family, Albin must, once again, hide himself away. He is too gay, he is too much.
Albin takes centre stage with the Cagelles. As they begin their song, reminding the audience that this is all an illusion, Albin is unable to continue. He dismisses the Cagelles, breaking the pretence. The music stops and he begins, a cappella, the Act One finale, the song that will become a gay anthem: I Am What I Am.
When Albin removes his wig at the end of the song, he stands before the audience, before Georges, before Jean-Michel, without the armour we have seen him put on in A Little More Mascara. In that number he presents drag as performance, and the audience is allowed the comfort of pretending to believe in the illusion. Now, without his wig, the illusion is broken. He demands to be seen without contradiction, no longer pandering to the audience’s comfort. Zsa Zsa is not a pretence. She is Albin, Albin is her. The audience sees both at the same time and they hear, not an apology, not an excuse, but a demand for acceptance. Their eyes are open and Albin is seen and heard. But, as is common with farce, knowledge is unevenly distributed. The audience sees Albin’s truth but the characters on stage still need Act Two to catch up.
As I navigated my teenage years I split myself into two different worlds, one public and acceptable, one shrouded in secrecy and shame. I told no-one who I was until I had left home for University. I had been having sex with men for years but until I was 19, I had never been kissed. When I finally came out to my parents at 21 (then the legal age of consent for gay men), we were estranged for years. They too needed another act to catch up.
In the early 2000’s, every weekend I would pour myself into a tight dress, two pairs of Danskin tights, stilettos, a wig, and a face full of Kryolan paint stick #072. I would step onto a stage somewhere in London as Miss Demeanour, the Diva of Dalston. Invariably, I would end my show with I Am What I Am. No matter how large or small the crowd, I belted it out with my heart and soul. I belted that song to every bully, every thug, everyone who called me names, or spat at me in the street, every abuser, everyone who took what I didn’t want to give, everyone who made me feel less than. I belted it out to my parents. To a man on a factory floor. One night, my mum came to see my show. My dad never did. I don’t know that my parents see me even now but I am here. I know I am what I am. I struggle with knowing whether that is enough.