Broadway Review Roundup: LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, Take 2!

The Tony Award-winning production of the celebrated musical comedy LA CAGE AUX FOLLES now stars four-time Tony Award-winner and LA CAGE AUX FOLLES author Harvey Fierstein as Albin and two-time Tony Award-nominee Christopher Sieber as Georges.

The original production of LA CAGE AUX FOLLES was one of Broadway's biggest hits of the 1980s. It opened August 21, 1983 at the Palace Theatre, where it played for over four years and 1,761 performances. The show won six Tony Awards in 1984, including Best Musical, Best Score (Jerry Herman) and Best Book (Harvey Fierstein).

Georges (Christopher Sieber) is the suave owner of a glitzy drag club on the French Riviera. Partnered romantically with his high-strung star performer, Albin (Harvey Fierstein), the pair live a charmed life - until Georges' son announces his engagement to the daughter of a conservative right-wing politician who's coming to dinner. Did the new leads charm critics as well? Find out now!

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: You might have predicted that for Mr. Fierstein, playing Albin/Zaza (for the first time) would be a walk in the park (or a promenade, since Zaza never merely walks), and so it proves. Appearing opposite a first-rate Christopher Sieber - as Georges, the St. Tropez nightclub host who is Albin's longtime partner - Mr. Fierstein wears his sequins like an army veteran's well-earned badges of honor. When he sings "I Am What I Am," the show's anthem, it is with blazing old-trouper authority.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Post: Happily, Harvey Fierstein and Christopher Sieber have just revived this revival...Sieber and Fierstein's easy complicity also makes the show more sweetly subversive: It's now impossible to overlook the fact that we're watching two men in love, and they're so endearing that it's equally impossible not to root for them.

Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News: Nearly a year into the run, director Terry Johnson's production, which began in London, is in excellent shape. The best of times is still now.

Matt Windman, amNewYork: With his frog-like voice and oversized figure, Fierstein is perhaps the most unlikely person ever cast in the role of Zaza. But wearing a large corset and fake eyelashes, he delivers a winning performance that mixes playful clowning and expert comic delivery with genuine sensitivity. Christopher Sieber...is also terrific. His strong voice is well-suited to ballads like "Song on the Song" and "Look Over There." Sieber is just as dashing and determined as Fierstein is bizarre, and together they make a perfect pair.

Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: Sieber's twinkly musical-theater charm and relative youth - he is 16 years younger than Fierstein - are not ideal for a part that needs an older and more old-fashioned presence...Fierstein does his consirable best to fill the vacuum with shtick: He plumbs the depths of his famous voice, he sticks out his tongue and makes grotesque faces, he dons outrageous wigs and throws fits with babyish grandeur. But in the end, it can't pave over the damage to La Cage's main drag.

 

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