Free May the Farce Be With You by Roger Foss

farcical machinery. Just when the opera house mayhem is about to spin out of control, along comes another tap routine or love interest ballad to halt the spiralling action. It’s as if, when rearranging the original script, the co-authors ignored a key rule of farce – however absurd the characters and the situations may be, they must be entirely believable within the crazed logic of the plot.
    If La Cage aux Folles sticks glue-like to the crazed logic of the plot it’s probably because book writer Harvey Fierstein and composer Jerry Herman based the musical on the original 1973 gender-bending French stage farce by actor, director and screenwriter Jean Poiret, who co-starred in the hit play when it premiered in Paris in 1973 and also scripted the 1978 film adaptation (which was followed by two mildly funny sequels, La Cage aux Folles 2 and La Cage aux Folles 3: The Wedding and a Hollywood remake, The Birdcage , which was so unfunny it turned laughter into an instrument of torture).
    The original production of La Cage aux Folles enjoyed a four-year run on Broadway and a short season in London in 1986, by which time the story of Albin and Georges, two middle-aged homosexual lovers who run a transvestite nightclub in St Tropez, didn’t quite chime with the Aids-panicking times. The escalating plotrevolves around the entanglements that develop when Georges’ son announces that he is getting married to the daughter of a local morality crusader. Herman’s sublime score (‘A Little More Mascara’, The Best of Times’, the anthemic ‘I Am What I Am’)gives the comedy line pause for breath, but continues to illuminate characters and their situations.
    We had to wait until 2008 to discover and enjoy the full farcical force of this musical. As critic Eric Bentley observed in The Psychology of Farce, danger is omnipresent in all good farce – ‘One touch, we feel, and we shall be sent spinning into outer space.’ Playwright/director Terry Johnson’s small-scale Menier Chocolate Factory production (which later successfully transferred to the West End and Broadway),spun the audience right into the show’s sexual danger zone because his production delivered both the language of musical theatre and the language of farce in equal measure, always pushing the ‘normality’ of life in a St Tropez drag club further and further towards absurdity and culminating in effeminate Albin’s farcical attempt to disguise himself as ‘mother’ when his lover’s son brings home his fiancée’s ultra-conservative parents to meet them.
    The worlds of farce and musical theatre have linked hands ever since Aristophanes used a Greek chorus of frisky frogs to debate the merits of plays by Aeschylusand Euripides. If Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were around in Shakespeare’s day, I wouldn’t mind betting the Bard himself would have commissioned them to set The Comedy of Errors to music and call it The Boys from Syracuse . Mozart knew a thing or two about classic farcical plots too. The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutti are farces to the core.
    Apart from farce and melodrama, one of the mainstays of Victorian theatre was the burletta – musical farces in three acts with five songs in each. Long before he teamed up with W.S. Gilbert, Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote the score for Cox and Box or, The Long-Lost Brothers based on John Maddison Morton’s popular mid-Victorian farce Box and Cox . In 1948, Where’s Charley? Frank Loesser and George Abbott’s adaptation of Brandon Thomas’ classic Victorian college farce Charley’s Aunt made ‘Once in Love With Amy’ a hit for Norman Wisdom.
    More recently, it was fascinating to see how big West End and Broadway musical comedies, such as Betty Blue Eyes and Legally Blonde include hilarious moments where farce-like comedy and music are both singing from the same song sheet. In Betty Blue Eyes