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ased on Jean Poiret's comedy, La jaula de las locas is a musical by Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman that premiered on Broadway in 1983 and ran until 1987, with great box office success and Tony Awards recognition. Revived in 2004, it would win another award, this time in the "Best Revival" category. The synopsis is simple, which allows the entanglements to multiply and the plot to take flight. Albin and Georges are a homosexual couple who run La cage aux folles, a cabaret on the French Riviera where they program dance and variety acts.
There, an atmosphere of moral openness reigns that will hardly be tolerated by Jean-Michel's (Georges' biological son) future father-in-law. The latter, a conservative party politician, advocates a traditional family model and is preparing to visit them with his wife and Anne, his daughter, to formalize the young couple's engagement.
Such an imminent and irreconcilable confrontation, a priori topical, might seem uninteresting. In fact, the 1996 film The Birdcage -based on that play, and starring Robin Williams- suffers from a tiresome pace, by articulating a series of falsely unpredictable situations. But none of this happens in Àngel Llàcer and Manu Guix's version, due to the freshness and quality of the performances. Llàcer is the absolute protagonist, either as Albin, partner of a Georges (Iván Labanda) with a gift for people, or transformed into "Zazà", while the butler (Ricky Mata), a compulsive histrion, is the most celebrated supporting character. The dynamic development of the plot is contributed by the live cabaret music, which recalls the carefree atmosphere of the first decades of jazz, with reminiscences of Dixieland, also known as hot jazz.
In addition to the performances and the wonderful musical interpretation (direction by Andreu Gallén), other particularly effective elements of the staging should be highlighted, for example the "double stage": on the one hand, the dance numbers, choreographed by Aixa Guerra, are offered to the spectator as if they were indeed in the cabaret La cage aux folles, while on other occasions what is shown at the Teatre Tivoli is the backstage of the cabaret, from which, in the background and simultaneously, that other stage -that of La cage aux folles- with music and performances in real time, is glimpsed. This scenic resource allows contrasting the public side of the protagonists, dedicated to the show, and the interior side, in which the impossible network of emotional relationships unfolds uncontrollably.
The audience's laughter condenses and precipitates, as the tension increases due to the imminent arrival of that representative of a unique and rigid moral order.Parallel plots or -rather- two types of exhibition make up the reality of individuals never entirely trapped in the cage. For they enter and leave the show to the delight of the spectators, who witness their daily lives and their transformation in context.burlesque("if my heart is broken, I begin my transformation, with just a little more mascara…", Albin/Zazà sings with abandon in his introductory number). The audience's laughter condenses and precipitates, as the tension grows with the imminent arrival of that representative of a unique and rigid moral order, not fond of ambiguities, double meanings or, of course, transformations. But he himself, Jean-Michel's future father-in-law and Albin's perfect foil, will have to agree to the transformation, as the only way out of the final entanglement.
HUMOROUS PYROTECHNICS
Even if most attendees know they will enjoy the farce, and are already won over in advance - unleashed applause already in the first musical number, very lively but merely introductory - that individual who might not be particularly motivated by the fact of attending the show - there he is, as an escort or due to another type of commitment - he too, to a large extent, is invited to accept the carnival mask or - which is the same - to let go of his seriousness, in so many cases a shield that protects us from the unknown or the different.
The burlesque nature of the show is assumed by the characters themselves, basically by the protagonist, who exaggerates the bohemian way of pronouncing Baudelaire's language, placing the emphasis impéccablement on the interminable "r", which in phonology is called "guttural rhotic". It is no longer just that he refers to his Georrrrrrrges - and we abbreviate - with unmistakable affectation, but that he makes jokes so explicit that they seem to incorporate the laughter, which he indeed ends up awakening in the attendees. Like when he states, in one of his most brilliant sung numbers, that although at first glance he may seem like "a Ferrero Rocher" (due to the golden, magnificent and pompous nature of his feminine dress), deep down he is a "Kinder Surprise".
The confinement space of La Cage aux Folles is actually -abounding in paradox- the occasion for liberation through celebration, where specular effects, doublings, and sometimes surprising identifications occur. When Georges learns that his son is getting married and repudiates the figure of Zazà as his mother, he does not hesitate to reproach him with words that confirm the human tendency to disqualification: "Judas, traitor... Heterosexual!" Humorous pyrotechnic games delineate the playful and unpretentious character of the show, with the joke being a vehicle for otherwise incommunicable truths, as Sigmund Freud already explained in his famous article, stating that everything can be said in jest, even the truth.
"Oh Georges, but what have we raised, an animal? Snakes live together, male and female, cats live together, male and female. We are humans, we know more!"Situations that are only seemingly light reveal from a new perspective the universal existence of prejudices, which allows us to become aware of the habitually tendentious nature of the notion of "normality." When Albin learns of his adopted son's future civil status, one of the most hilarious interventions takes place, which aims to be -in effect- impeccable from the point of view of formal logic, but which obviously, like all human affairs, reveals a no less understandable partiality: "Oh Georges, but what have we raised, an animal? Snakes live together, male and female, cats live together, male and female. We are humans, we know more! But if you are a boy... and she is a girl... what will you talk about?"
CELEBRATING DIFFERENCE WITH MICHEL (DE MONTAIGNE)
The play starring and directed by Àngel Llàcer is shamelessly funny. A show that has something of a parody, while being a celebration of the spectacle, of the ability to transform oneself on stage and, with all that, be oneself. The coincidence of opposites awakens laughter, as the deployment of visual and sound means seems to have no end. Even those who attend out of obligation - or in a bad mood, sensing that today is certainly not the day to dive into the pool of the different or "get into the cage" - end up feeling part of the show. Because what is erased for a moment, through the magic of laughter, is the separation between those who are outside and those who are inside. Anne, daughter of the ultra-normative politician, tells Jean-Michel: "you are so lucky to have normal parents." The parable of fiction and the false innocence of the joke allows us to become aware of stereotypes, to gain perspective.
And, with perspective, the recognition that the other, in the role of "the different," we can also be representing for others. "Nothing is as universal as difference," Michel de Montaigne had already pointed out in a remote 16th century, in his essay On Experience, also trying to shy away from the most operative dogmatisms of his time and noting the power of custom. And it is that an individual is not only distinguished from his fellow men, never entirely equal, but also from himself, being "another" at various times of the day. The subject appears as unique, possessing an identity in the document that is accompanied by numbering and a passport photo. Officially, being can be registered and certified, but not the quantity of situations and affections that one experiences in the course of life, and through which one may not always recognize oneself with that one.
The ability to laugh at oneself while being another, participating in different possibilities, far from dislocating or corrupting, implies a recreation of the mythical essence of the party.That intrinsic difference can be unsettling (theDoppelgängerof romantic literati) or quite the opposite. The ability to laugh at oneself by being someone else, or by participating in different possibilities -even extreme ones, as in La cage aux folles- far from disorienting or corrupting, recreates the very essence of the party, since time immemorial: a celebration that socially integrates and makes the individual feel part of reality, with an ever-new intensity. The experience of the present, oblivious to the productive management of time. "The best moment is today," sings Llàcer, and progressively each of the characters. As in the best musicals, they assert themselves through a magical space-time that the song inaugurates.