Christopher Sieber and Harvey Fierstein have taken over the lead roles in Tony-winning Broadway revival of LA CAGE AUX FOLLES (photo by Joan Marcus)
Longacre Theater
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tickets: $47.50 – $79.50 with this special offer
www.lacage.com
La Cage Aux Folles began its life as a 1973 French play written by and starring Jean Poiret with Michel Serrault, about a young man who is introducing his fiancée’s conservative parents to his father and his father’s rather flamboyant drag-performing lover. Five years later it was turned into a film by Édouard Molinaro starring Ugo Tognazzi and Serrault, and in 1983 it became a hit Broadway musical, winning six Tonys, including Best Book of a Musical (Harvey Fierstein), Best Original Score (Jerry Herman), and Best Musical. In 1996, Mike Nichols remade the original film as The Birdcage, with Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, and Gene Hackman. And now the musical is back on Broadway, in a new production at the Longacre Theatre that earned 2010 Tonys for Best Musical Revival as well as Best Actor (Douglas Hodge) and Best Director (Terry Johnson).
The cast has just undergone a number of changes, the most exciting of which has Fierstein playing Albin/Zaza for the first time ever; in addition, Christopher Sieber is the new Georges, replacing Jeffrey Tambor, who lasted a mere nine days taking over for Tony nominee Kelsey Grammer; other current cast members include A. J. Shively as Jean-Michel, Mike McShane as M. Renaud/M. Dindon, Alyce Beasley as Mme. Dindon/Mme. Renaud, Wilson Jermaine Heredia as Jacob, and Elena Shaddow as Anne. La Cage Aux Folles, which features such songs as “We Are What We Are,” “I Am What I Am,” “Song on the Sand,” “Masculinity,” and “The Best of Times,” is currently running a special discount offer that saves you forty percent, but twi-ny also has two pairs of tickets to give away for free, good for Tuesdays at 8:00, Wednesdays at 2:30 and 8:00, Thursdays at 8:00, and Saturdays at 2:30 through May 1. To be eligible to win, just send your name and daytime phone number to contest@twi-ny.com by Monday, April 4, at 12 noon. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; two winners will be selected at random.
One of the best films of 2008, A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël) is yet another extraordinary work from French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (La Sentinelle, Esther Kahn). Desplechin, who examined family dysfunction in the masterful Kings and Queen (one of the best films of 2006), brings back much of that film’s cast in A Christmas Tale. Catherine Deneuve stars as Junon, the family matriarch who has just discovered she has leukemia and is in need of a bone-marrow transplant. Although it is rare for children to donate bone marrow to their mother (or grandmother), Junon insists that they all take the test to see if they are compatible. Soon they gather at Junon and Abel’s (Jean-Paul Roussilon) house for the holidays: oldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a dark and depressed woman whose teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling), has been institutionalized with mental problems and whose husband, Claude (Hippolyte Girardot), is rarely home; Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), the youngest son, a carefree sort married to Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve’s real-life daughter), whom Junon strongly distrusts; and black sheep Henri (Mathieu Almaric), the middle child who was initially conceived primarily to save Abel and Junon’s first son, Joseph, who ended up dying of the same leukemia that Junon has contracted. Henri, who shows up with a new girlfriend, the very direct Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos), is a philandering ne’er-do-well who is deeply estranged from Elizabeth and not close with his mother, leading to much strife as Christmas — and a possible transplant — nears. Desplechin, who wrote the script with Emmanuel Bourdieu, once again has created powerful, realistic characters portrayed marvelously by his extremely talented cast; despite the family’s massive dysfunction, you’ll feel that even spending more than two and a half hours with them is not enough. A Christmas Tale concludes BAMcinématek’s month-long “Deneuve” series in high style.
This should have been a great one, but controversial director François Ozon couldn’t leave well enough alone. Somewhere in 8 Women is a fabulously entertaining murder mystery set in a mansion in which the title characters are trapped — and any one of the eight could be guilty of the murder of the dude in the bedroom who has a knife in his back. The eight women embody much of the history of French cinema of the previous fifty years: Danielle Darrieux (who began making films in the early 1930s), Catherine Deneuve (who, when this movie was made, was nearly sixty!), Fanny Ardant (who had recently turned fifty), a nearly unrecognizable Isabelle Huppert (who was approaching fifty), the beguiling Emmanuelle Béart (who was nearing forty), twentysomethings Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier, and Firmine Richard. Inexplicably, Ozon has each of the characters perform a silly song-and-dance number that neither furthers the plot nor expands on the characters’ motives or mental state. He bit off more than he could chew; he made a compelling takeoff of the British drawing-room mystery and blew it by deciding to play off the Hollywood Technicolor musical as well. But Ardant’s lips, Deneuve’s eyelashes, and Béart’s curves are nearly worth the price of admission nonetheless. 8 Women is screening as part of BAMcinématek’s “Deneuve” series, which concludes March 31 with Arnaud Desplechin’s outstanding A Christmas Tale.
