In celebration of the new City Center revival of La Cage aux Folles and Pride Month, I’m currently spotlighting two queer men connected to La Cage. Last week I wrote about William Thomas, Jr., the first Black actor involved with the show. This week, I’m looking at Barry Brown, the show’s co-executive producer, whose work on HIV/AIDS fundraising helped laid the groundwork for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. More background on La Cage here.

Barry Brown and Fritz Holt telling executive producer Allan Carr that his original creative team had to go (check out part I of my interview with Brown) matched the advice he was getting from his lawyer John Breglio. After six months of contract negotiations with Mike Nichols, Jay Presson Allen, and Tommy Tune’s agent Sam Cohn, Breglio had warned Carr that the price tag regarding royalties was becoming impossible and meanwhile the rights were running out.

The problem was, as Breglio told me, “Nobody ever said no to Sam Cohn.” But hearing that only further motivated Carr to pull the trigger. “Allan said to me, I know what I’m doing. I’m flying to New York, you and I are going to see Sam Cohn and we’re going to pass on it,” Breglio said. “So he flew in, we marched over to see Sam. I’m sure Sam was positive we were meeting with him to cave on everything.”

In his book I Wanna Be a Producer, Breglio describes the scene that unfolds.

Allan was uncharacteristically serious, almost somber, as he began to lay out his agenda. He was brief and to the point: ‘Sam, there are no artists for whom I have more respect than those you represent in this deal. They are a dream team. But the drama of our negotiations over the past six months is the only theater we’re going to see—this deal is over. I’m withdrawing all of my offers and I plan to hire a completely new team for La Cage.’

There was dead silence. Sam stood up, stopped chewing on some Kleenex (which he did regularly), and laughed nervously. Allan assured him he was being completely serious. Allan shook Sam’s hand and asked him to please convey his gratitude to everyone involved in the project. With that, we left Sam’s office and returned to mine. I had never seen Sam nonplussed before. I can only imagine the ensuing phone calls with his clients.

Meanwhile Brown and Holt were trying to find a new creative team. Some choices were easy.

So what did you do?

Brown: We started talking, and we both said Jerry Herman.

And we had seen Torch Song Trilogy off- off-Broadway. We were just bowled over about it. We just loved it, both of us. So we had who we wanted to write it.

How was it talking to Jerry and Harvey about signing on?

It was easy to get them to say yes. Jerry had wanted to do it for years and years and years.

Then came the director discussion.

I don’t want get too much in the way of Brown here, but before we go on, it’s worth taking a moment to talk about Arthur Laurents.

By all accounts, he was maybe the greatest book writer that has ever lived. He could be an excellent director, as well. In my interview with three of La Cage’s original Cagelles, David Engel (Hanna from Hamburg), Dan O’Grady (Odette), and Dennis Callahan (Monique) recalled the way Laurents empowered them.

Engel: The very first day of rehearsal, Arthur Laurents said, we are not doing this apologetically. We are proudly playing these roles.

O’Grady: He gave us all storylines. We weren’t just playing drag queens, everyone had a story. Some were more developed than others, but we all had a bit of one. Arthur really instilled in us that we were important to the story, and that it was important that we comported ourselves onstage with dignity. It made it less for me about drag and more about integrity.

Callahan: The Cagelles were given the last bow. When does that ever happen? That was something. We all lined up, our backs were to the audience. One after another we took off our coats and our wigs and threw them in this cart as it walked by, and then our arms went straight up into the air and we turned around. It was always such a rush, a total transformation. We each took a humble bow as ourselves, the ten men and two women. The sound of the audience was unbelievable.

But many who knew Laurents well—including many I’ve spoken to—also described their experience of Laurents with the same combination of bafflement and frustration that Mary Rodgers expresses in her memoir Shy. “Talent,” she writes, “excuses almost anything but Arthur Laurents.”

Laurents could be unexpectedly vicious or cruel, especially toward his peers, and Brown and Holt were no exceptions.

You and Fritz had worked with Arthur on multiple shows?

He directed both of our Gypsys, Angie and Tyne. And we became really, really close friends. Until we didn’t. He stopped talking to us, for whatever reason. I don’t think anybody ever knows why he would stop talking to people.

We were at Jerry Herman’s one day talking about directors, and we tossed around a lot of names, like everybody does. And this one fell short this way and this one fell short that way. And I finally said, You know who really should direct this?

And Fritz said, If you’re talking about who I think you’re talking about, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I’m going to go California, I’ll get started on the TV thing, I’m not interested.

(Fritz and I had been hired by NBC to produce a big three-hour variety show, which never happened.)

And Jerry said, Who are you talking about? Arthur Laurents, I said. And his immediate reaction was, He has such a terrible reputation. Do you really want to work with him? I said, Well, we have a first-time-out book writer. Who better to direct? And Fritz said, Bye bye.

Segue I don’t know how many weeks later, I was in East Hampton visiting friends, and I called Arthur. He had a house in Quogue. And this is a perfect example of who he was. I said Arthur, It’s Barry Brown. Remember me? And he said, Just.

Yikes.

I said, Well I’m in East Hampton visiting friends, and there’s something I’d like to come talk about. If you want me to write La Cage Aux Folles, the answer’s no.

I said, No, that’s not what it is. He said, Alright. Come tomorrow at 1:30. But don’t expect lunch.

And you had no context for any of this rage. This is just how he’s treating you now?

Yeah.

So I went over and we sat down opposite each other, and he leaned back and said, Well?

And I said, Would you be interested in directing La Cage? Because for whatever else he was, he was brilliant. His first words were, Who’s writing it?

I told him, Jerry Herman’s writing the score, and Harvey Fierstein’s writing the book.

He asked, You have them? They’re signed? And I said, yes. (Which I didn’t.)

And he leaned forward and said, I’ll do it. Just like that.

Then he said, Now, have you thought about designers? What about Theoni [Aldredge] to do the clothes? He didn’t call them costumes, he said “the clothes.”

And he said, I‘m coming back into town on Monday. Get Harvey and Jerry and Fritz, come down to St. Luke’s—he lived on St. Luke’s Place.

How was Fritz with this?
I didn’t tell him. He’d gone to California, like he threatened. So by the time I told him it was kind of a done deal.

In Arthur’s book, he says the only reason he agreed to direct La Cage is because Fritz Holt asked him to. He was a little bit in love with Fritz, as most people were.

I later called him on that. And he said, Well, if it goes into a second printing I’ll say you both asked me. He could be such a prick.

How did Arthur, Jerry, and Harvey end up working together?

You know what, it was a love fest among the three of them from the very beginning. The three of them got along beautifully. There were no mishaps, no going to get rid of anybody, nothing. Arthur was an angel to Harvey.

Some people I’ve talked to have wondered whether Arthur was involved with aspects of the book—for instance, during the times that Harvey would have been away with Torch Song on Broadway.

I think Arthur trod very lightly with Harvey. He didn’t want Harvey to feel that he Arthur as a book writer was taking over or insinuating himself into the writing of the book any more than a good director does. (And a director does.)

I don’t know what went on behind closed doors between them, but to my knowledge I don’t think Arthur insinuated himself as a book writer into the show. One time, a scene I can’t remember, Fritz and I went to Arthur and said, You can see as well as we can that this really isn’t working. Can you step in and please write it?

And he said, I can’t do that to Harvey. He said, He and I will talk and he’ll find his way, but I won’t do that. I wouldn’t want someone to do it to me.

Gotta respect that.

There are things that Arthur would have wanted that Harvey went along with. But I think Harvey was smart enough to know that his director was also the best book writer in the business and he knew what he was doing and Harvey had never written a Broadway musical.

They got along famously, the three of them. They called themselves The Collaborationists. Not collaborators; the Collaborationists, the three of them. Really to my surprise it was a love fest.

Once you had them, was it pretty easy to sell the show to backers?

We didn’t have to raise money. That was part of our deal. We just produced it. We wouldn’t have done it otherwise.

Why?

It was never our strength, raising money. We always brought in one or two other people who had connections to a lot of money. And we always got money from the theater owner. We always had respect from the Shuberts and from Jimmy Nederlander, so they always invested with us if we were going into one of their houses. But that was a small part of whatever the capitalization was of any given show.

And you know, five million dollars was… We couldn’t even think of it in those days.

The show cost $5 million to produce?

*nods*

Nine hundred thousand dollars of that was the costumes.

Wow.

Arthur said, We have to give them a spectacle, and the way to do that is through the costumes. They were just unbelievable.

So we did all the nuts and bolts with our general manager of getting a theater and doing the advertising and publicity and the press office and riding herd on the cast. And where in all our other shows we were the lead producers, in this we were hired hands. We were employees.

Could Allan have gotten rid of you?

Once we hired Arthur, we knew we were safe. Arthur would not have done the show without us there to run interference between him and Allan. Not that we ever feared that we were going to be fired, but once we put it together, it was our show.

What was Allan like to work with?

He was a handful. He was inconsistent in his generosity, inconsistent in the way he treated people. Like Arthur—although Allan wasn’t mean and evil like Arthur was. You know that old nursery rhyme, The little girl who lived down the lane, and when she was good, she was very good, and when she was bad she was horrid? That was both Arthur and Allan.

But with Allan it was less malicious?

Correct. Although he could be. Fritz and I talked a couple times about the way he treated waitpersons in a restaurant. At one point we said to him we’re never going to a restaurant with you again. You can’t talk to people that way.

But he could be fun and lovely and generous. He could be.

Was he pretty hands on in terms of La Cage?

More than anybody would have liked. I would say that 50% of our job turned out to be undoing things that Allan did or was about to do. And he and Arthur were like water and oil. Whatever people expected between Arthur and Jerry and Harvey happened between Arthur and Allan.

What did taking care of him look like?
Lots of things, especially when it came to press and publicity. He was kind of a master in Hollywood in terms of promoting things. But the way that you promote things in Hollywood is not what you do here. As Arthur would have said to him: We don’t do that in a legitimate theater.

One of the people who bore the brunt of that was Shirley Herz, who was our press person, and an angel. What she had to field with Allan was a full-time job.

Once you’ve got your creative team in place, were you also involved with the casting?

Absolutely. We were there from the get go every single minute, if for no other reason than to rein Allan in. He was impossible. Every guy who came into auditions, he wanted them to take his shirt off.

Yeah, someone told me a story like that.

I’m sure.

When the show gets to rehearsal, between you and Fritz, who’s doing what? How do you split the work?

Well, Fritz was far more technical than I was in terms of how things worked backstage. If I had to define it, I would say that Fritz was everything from the proscenium back, and I was everything out front—although he was out front as well, while I was not very much backstage, because that was not anywhere near my expertise.

I have to tell you, one of Arthur’s stipulations was, I will only do the show if Fritz is my production stage manager. Fritz’s reputation pretty much was he was THE stage manager. I was told a story a long time ago, when Tom O’Horgan was in technical rehearsals for Jesus Christ Superstar, they were at the Hellinger, Follies was at the Winter Garden. Apparently at one point he had a breakdown, stood in the middle of the stage and said somebody go across the street and get me Fritz Holt.

So Arthur said, I want Fritz to be my PSM. Rehearsal, out of town, opening night. After opening night, you can turn it over to your assistant, and Fritz said he would. He hadn’t stage managed in years.

And it was a huge production.

Huge. But he had done Follies. So that’s kind of how the pieces fell.

Fritz and I were at the theater virtually every performance. Usually it was the two of us; sometimes it was him or me. We always felt that if you have stars in a show, they need to be taken care of. So we would go to George [Hearn]’s dressing room and Gene [Barry]’s dressing room every performance —Everything alright? Is there anything you need? And we pretty much did that with everybody. We’d be around backstage, the dressing rooms or whatever until curtain, and then we’d leave.

During previews, you mean? Not for the entire run of the show.

The entire run of the show. Every performance.

Is that standard?

It is not standard. But it’s why when we closed 4 or 5 years later (whenever it was), we had something like almost 90% of the original cast. If you treat the folks in the show right, and you work to make sure there is no line between creative and management, which of course there always is by definition of every show, but we tried to make sure there was not…We gave everybody raises every 6 months, which is unheard of. That was one of the things we had to fight Allan about.

(We also fought Jimmy Nederlander to make the last rows in the balcony of the Palace Theater ten dollars, so that everybody could go to the show if they want, the kids in other shows. I mean they weren’t great seats, but they could get into the show.)

How about with the touring companies or the California company? Were you still involved?

Every step of the way. For the national companies either Fritz or me would go out every two weeks to see it, make sure it was up to snuff. Actors tend to put in their own little improvements. We were there to make sure they did not.

No, it was absolutely hands-on.

I’m amazed by your level of attention.

This is going to sound stupid, but we cared. If you don’t care to that degree, I think it’s going to show in the show. I think if you don’t care, don’t do it. People’s lives are on the line. This is what they do for a living. They have to pay their rent, too. It’s not just “a show.”

Each show is like your child. Some of them live and grow and become adults, and some of them are stillborn. And you don’t know each time out what it’s going to be.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Coming Next: Telling a joyful gay story in the 1980s, and in the AIDS crisis.

In celebration of the new City Center revival of La Cage aux Folles and Pride Month, I’m currently spotlighting two queer men connected to La Cage. Last week I wrote about William Thomas, Jr., the first Black actor involved with the show. This week, I’m looking at Barry Brown, the show’s co-executive producer, whose work on HIV/AIDS fundraising helped laid the groundwork for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. More background on La Cage here.

If you ever visit the legendary Broadway hangout Joe Allen’s on West 46^th Street, you may notice a little alcove just beyond the bar with a couple tables and walls filled with photos. Much of the art in Joe Allen’s consists of posters of Broadway shows that didn’t succeed, which I always think of as a sign of real appreciation for the incredible effort, craftsmanship, and sacrifice that goes into putting on any show.

But in this one nook in the back the walls are instead filled with black and white and color photos. Some are actors or people involved in the theater. But many aren’t recognizable. “These aren’t all famous people,” a waiter told me recently. “They’re friends of Joe Allen. But if you’re friends of Joe Allen, you’re going places.”

Amongst Joe’s friends is a photo of two men looking directly into the camera. There’s a combination of confidence and wonder about them, and the photo almost has the feeling of a record cover from an accomplished duo.

Which is all kind of a propos. Because over the course of their careers these two men, Barry Brown and Fritz Holt, stage managed and/or produced some of Broadway’s most admired musicals, including Follies, Company, multiple productions of Gypsy, and La Cage aux Folles.

Born in San Francisco to George and Leah Holt, George William Holt III—nicknamed “Fritz” by his father—studied at the University of Oregon, then moved to New York, where he was assistant stage manager at the Mineola Playhouse on Long Island. At the time, the theater had only recently opened. Its first production, around the time that Holt started there, starred Liza Minelli through in Carnival! Jan. 28, 1964-March 22. The next brought her back to costar with Elliot Gould in The Fantasticks, Sept. 22, 1964—Oct. 11.

A little over a year later, from April 11-May 7, 1966, Sandy Duncan played Wendy there in the touring company of Peter Pan . Chita Rivera came through in September to play Jenny in Threepenny Opera. Holt actually had a role in the show as the Constable.

A year later he played one of the deputies in the world premiere play The Genius Farm, which starred Marni Nixon and ran from Aug. 16-28, 1965, before being hired away by Hal Prince to assistant stage manage the touring company of Cabaret. He would go on to serve as Prince’s Broadway stage manager for the 1969 play Indians, then as production stage manager for Prince on Stephen Sondheim’s Company and Follies.

It was through Sondheim that Holt first met Barry Brown, a young record executive at BMI who had a deep connection of his own to Broadway.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Barry Brown: My dad worked at Chappell Music, going to all these openings and he brought the cast albums home every time. He had a stable of like 5 writers who were really his responsibility. It was the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Lerner & Loewe, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and Jule Styne. That’s who he took care of. Lee and Ira Gershwin became my honorary godparents when I was like 10 or 11 years old.

Between my father and Ira, nobody was every surprised I went into theater, except me!

How did you and Fritz meet?

Steve Sondheim and I were good friends. When Follies was up in Boston, I went up for a weekend to see him. But the weekend I went up, it turns out they were replacing one number with another number and he had to go away and write. He said, I have no time for you. And he turned to the stage manager and said, Barry Brown, this is Fritz Holt. Fritz Holt, this is Barry Brown. Can you please make sure Barry gets in to see the show whenever he wants?

When they came back to town, Fritz and I and close mutual friends would meet up for dinner after the show and stuff. And eventually we became a couple. Through the ‘70s until he died, it was almost like one word, Fritz’n’Barry, or Barry’n’Fritz.

How did the two of you go from record executive and stage manager to producers?

We were in Joe Allen’s one night after Follies. I used to go and hang out in Yvonne [DeCarlo]’s dressing room. It was wonderful. She was a hoot.

Somebody had come to me and wanted to know if I wanted to go to London and co-produce a London version of an off Broadway play called the Last Sweet Days of Isaac, which is a wonderful musical. And I said I was thinking about doing it.

And Fritz said, Really? You’re going to leave your job and go to London and leave everything to do a little off-Broadway show?

He said, Don’t do that. Go to London and produce something. Make a bigger splash. Do Gypsy or something.

I said, I don’t want to do something that’s already been done. And he said, Gypsy’s never been done in London. I said, Fritz, my father publishes the music. I know it has been. He said No no, it hasn’t. I’m telling you, it hasn’t been done.

I didn’t believe him. So I went to the telephone and called Steve. Has Gypsy ever been done in London? He said, No.

I asked, Can you take a break? He used to work at night. He said, Sure. I said, Okay, get out the white wine, Fritz and I are coming over.

So we went over and we explained it. He said, Who are you thinking of to play Rose? We had talked at Joe Allen’s about Angela Lansbury. He said, It’s a great idea. You have my blessing. He turned to me and he said, I would love it if your first one was one of mine. Which was sweet.

I said to Fritz, Great, let’s do it. He responded, I’m not going to London, you are! I’ve got a good job with this man *pointing to Steve*. When I’m finished with Follies I’m going to do A Little Night Music.

I said, Nothing doing. This is your idea. I’m not going to do this by myself.

Steve said, You’re going to have to meet with Arthur Laurents before you do anything else. I’ll call him and tell him. Arthur later told me he hung up the phone with Steve and said, What two tricks is he sending over this time?

So we met with Arthur, and asked would he direct it? And that’s how we did it.

Wow. Stephen Sondheim had quite a role in your lives!

Then we went to London. Angie was on a press junket for Bedknobs and Broomsticks and her agent arranged that if we could get ourselves to London, we could meet with her. We had lunch with her and her husband. And she turned us down. She was in Ireland with the kids and she had pretty much retired to take care of them.

So then we were going to do it with Elaine [Stritch], who Fritz knew intimately from Company. Elaine was madly in love with Fritz. Actually, he saved her life. She would come late to rehearsals on Company, and Hal and Ruth were going to fire her. Fritz said, Don’t do it. She’s going to deliver for you, I promise. I’ll take care of her. And he moved into the same hotel that she lived in in Boston just to make sure.

(I can give you a whole chapter on Elaine Stritch.)

Then Angie got in touch with us and asked, Is the offer still open? And then it came together quite quickly.

What a way to start as producers.

But we couldn’t even raise all the money! We’d never produced before. My parents put in a hundred dollars, Fritz’ parents put in a hundred dollars, that kind of stuff. And the last $90,000 we needed, Angie said, You know my brother’s a producer. He produced Godspell. If you want to meet with him and hist partner, they could probably get the rest of the money for you. And that’s what happened.

And that’s how we became producers. Seriously.

At some point Marvin Krauss became your go-to general manager. How did that happen?

When we first started out, Hal said to us, Get yourself a good general manager and a good attorney and 50% of your work is done. I don’t know who introduced us to Marvin, but when we were doing Gypsy in London, we met him.

He was one of those old-fashioned Broadway types. You know, one of the old boys’ club general managers who sits behind his desk and wheels and deals. If he smoked he would have had a cigar.

When we came back from London to do Gypsy here, Marvin gave us an empty office in his suite of offices. He never charged us rent, just did everything with us and for us. When the show got going we paid him to be the general manager, but I mean, we would hardly have been able to eat if it wasn’t for Marvin.

Really?

Yes. He gave us a home. And this is when the Palace Theatre building was still standing. His offices were in the Palace Theatre building.

By the time we got to La Cage, or even before that, he had moved to the top floors of the Alvin Theatre, now the Neil Simon.

And he had room for you in all these places?

Well, he had an empty room in the Palace Theatre. And when he didn’t really have room in the Alvin, Marvin and Jimmy Nederlander—who owned the Alvin— gave us what was Sandy the Dog’s dressing room during the run of Annie.

That was our office. We had a window facing out onto 52nd Street, and we had a butcher block table. I sat on one side, and Fritz sat on the other. And Marvin’s suite of offices was one floor below. We were running up and down the stairs, backstage at the Alvin, all the time.

So you really did operate on a shoestring.

It was less than a shoestring! We didn’t pay rent! Because we had nothing.

Between 1974 and 1982, Barry and Fritz would produce 7 shows on Broadway, including Gypsy, Saturday Sunday Morning, Summer Brave, The Royal Family, Platinum, The Madwoman of Central Park West, and Wally’s Cafe. In the middle they also spent two years in Hollywood working for Paramount Pictures, “screening movies and having the time of our lives,” says Brown.

But by 1982, a career change was feeling likely.

Were you already involved with La Cage when it was Jay and Maury and Tommy Tune and Mike Nichols?

Yes and no.

Fritz and I had just come off of three really big flops. Platinum; The Madwoman of Central Park West, a one-woman show with Phyllis Newman that she had written, which we should never have done, but we did it as a favor to Arthur; and Wally’s Cafe, with Jimmy Coco and Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers, which Fritz directed.

We were going to quit business. We had no money. I mean, we had no money. We were having dinner at the bar at Gallagher’s, because they served baskets of homemade French fries, which were the very thick cut potatoes. We would each have a glass of white wine and that basket of potatoes was our dinner. We had no money.

And Allan Carr came to us and offered us $10,000 if we would executive produce La Cage and get it going. For whatever flops and hits we had, and we had a lot of flops, our reputation was that we got shows on.

Did you know Allan already? Had you worked together?

We’d not worked together, but when we lived in LA for a couple years at the end of the ‘70s, somehow or other we got to know him. So yeah, we knew him. We weren’t pals, but we knew him.

By the way, Allan did not pay us a $10,000 fee, being Allan. He gave us a $10,000 advance. A big difference.

So this was at about the time that he was about to lose the rights, yes?

Yes. He sent us to Paris, and I spoke enough French that I could do some good over there. And we renewed the rights [with the original playwright Jean Poiret].

We had an extremely close friend, a Parisian, very well connected. He was a count. You know near the beginning of Auntie Mame, when she and Vera are running around her bedroom pulling things out of her closet to get dressed, because Mr. Babcock was downstairs waiting for her?

Yes.

At one point Vera grabs something out of the men’s closet and Mame says, Put that back, I’m not putting on my brand new $500 Maggy Rouff. Maggy Rouff was a designer who designed only one-off pieces for the very wealthy. And she was this guy’s grandmother.

We imposed upon him to talk to Poiret’s agents or lawyer and let him know that the show was going to take a different direction and could he see his way clear to renewing the rights. And they did.

But the show was still with the original team?

At this point, it was Jay Presson Allen on book, Maury Yeston on score and lyrics, Michael Smuin was the director—Mike Nichols had already gone.

We worked on it for a couple of months with them, then Fritz and I looked at each other and said, This is such a great idea for a musical, but this is not working for us. First of all, Jay Presson Allen had changed the locale from Saint-Tropez to New Orleans, and her title was The Queen of Basin Street. And there were things in the script that I thought were very offensive.

Such as?

The first line of the script is “The apartment is furnished in early faggot.” We took some umbrage at that.

So we went to Allan and told him, Somehow, someday we’ll pay you back, but this is not for us. We’d love to, thank you, but you know, if you don’t believe in something you can’t spend years of your life with it. We couldn’t, anyway.

And he said, No no no no. What would you do? What do you want to do?

And we came back to him and said, Go home to Beverly Hills and let us put this together the way we would do it from a fresh start. Give us three months. We won’t do anything, obviously, without your approval.

And to his credit, and very unlike Allan, he did.

Then Fritz and I looked at each other and went Alright, now what the fuck do we do?

Next: What Fritz and Barry do (including, the Director Discussion)

I want to tell you about Broadway producer and AIDS activist Barry Brown. But before I can do that, today I need to tell you about La Cage aux Folles—not the La Cage that they’re doing at City Center right now, or the landmark Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical that Brown and his partner Fritz Holt produced on Broadway in 1983. These are the other versions, the ones that came before, and the ones that never happened.

Part I: “A Play for You and Me”

A weird thing happens pretty much any time you mention La Cage aux Folles to people who don’t already know its story. Either they think it’s the basis for the 1996 Hollywood film The Birdcage—and may be shocked to be reminded that The Birdcage was not a musical (although its director Mike Nichols was originally supposed to direct the musical; stay tuned)—or they don’t realize that the musical came first and think The Birdcage was the starting text.

In fact, La Cage aux Folles began as a 1973 French play by Jean Poiret, starring he and his frequent collaborator Michel Serrault as Jacques and Albin. The two had met while waiting to try out for a play. “Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get the part! I have a personal fortune!,” Poiret said to Serrault out of the blue in the waiting area, loud enough so all the other actors could hear. “It’s the same for me!,” Serrault responded instinctively. “My mother knows the concierge’s cousin.” The two went on like this, bragging loudly in front of the other actors about how certain it was they were going to be cast.

They were indeed each cast, but the far bigger discovery was how much fun they had improvising with each other. They started doing cabaret shows. In their breakthrough sketch, “Jerry Scott, International Star,” Poiret explained to the audience that they were about to have the great fortune of seeing the internationally-renowned actor Jerry Scott in his return to France, and then Serrault appeared, “wearing a nondescript gray suit and sporting the look of a bank teller—expressionless, with a gaze directed vaguely condescendingly toward the audience,” Serrault later wrote in his memoir.

As Poiret questioned “Jerry” about his work, the audience came to learn that his films have consisted of nothing but portrayals of 17^th century French Cardinal Richelieu in the most preposterous, Abbott and Costello-esque of settings— “Richelieu Among the Nazis,” “Richelieu and Frankenstein” and “Richelieu on the Santa Fe Trail,” which supposedly costarred John Wayne.

The two became something of the Abbott and Costello of France, frequently appearing on stage and in films in silly, collaborative roles, as well as individually in both comedic and serious roles.

Poiret had aspirations of writing plays. But even before he had plays produced, he had confided to Serrault the seed of the idea for La Cage. The two had gone to see the Charles Dyer play The Staircase, about a closeted aging gay London couple who face the possibility of being separated as one prepares to go on trial for dressing as a woman in public. After the show, Poiret said to Serrault, “This story about two old gay men hurling insults at each other all evening is fantastic!” But he wondered, “A similar theme treated as pure comedy, don’t you think it would be funnier?”

“I want to write that, Michel,” he told Serrault. “A play for you and me.”

Given the high profile that Poiret and Serrault had in Paris, their choice to do a play about drag queens generated a lot of interest before it opened to the public. Also, a lot of concern. “The rumor spread that we were going to do some rather aggressive things,” Serrault said in a TV interview decades later. “In some restaurants, we weren’t welcome.”

Some gay friends of theirs actually refused to see the play for months, even stopped speaking to them, out of concern that it was going to be a beat up of gay people. The title of the show itself contributed to those fears: “Folles” was French slang both for crazy women and men in drag.

But when the play opened on February 1^st, 1973, what audiences found was not a comedy laughing at gay men or drag culture, but a funny story of a long-time gay couple who have to figure out how to navigate the broader, largely homophobic culture of the times when their straight son decides to marry. In an interview with French TV, Poiret explained that he saw the play as an attempt to turn a conventional farce story line on its head. “Generally we’re used to putting normal people in abnormal situations, to seeing characters occupying an honorable and important position in society being forced…to dress like ladies,” he explained. “I took the opposite approach. People, who by profession dress up as ladies every night in a brothel, and are obliged to play so-called normal, so-called respectable roles.” It was a story that spotlight the strangeness of straight society, much as Harvey Fierstein’s witty book would later do in the musical.

Jean Poiret and Michel Serrault in La Cage aux Folles

The show was a once in a generation success, playing at the theater for seven years, 2500 performances and before 2 million audience members by Serrault’s count, with Poiret performing the first thousand and Serrault nearly 1500 shows. It came to be known as the show that ruined people’s train rides home: Even with the script firmly in hand, Poiret and Serrault were constantly improvising, which meant the run time could be anywhere from ten minutes shorter than its established length to an hour longer. Serrault recalled their castmates occasionally showing up for their cues only to discover their scene was already over.

There was no question that the play would become a movie. But it was customary in French circles to wait until the play had more or less closed to adapt it. And so it wasn’t until 1978 that the film La Cage aux Folles was released, with Serrault once again playing Albin and Italian star Ugo Tognazzi replacing Poiret in the role of Georges (now renamed Renato), as part of producer Marcello Danon’s attempts to extend the show’s reach beyond France. While director Édouard Molinaro admitted later that he only took the film because he needed the work, and said both stars were difficult to work with—Tognazzi refusing to say his lines in French (or sometimes at all), and Serrault supposedly uncomfortable with playing a gay character, the resulting movie combined the play’s comedy with a deep tenderness.

Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi in La Cage aux Folles, the movie

It, too, was a huge hit, not only in France but around the world. It earned over $20 million in the United States than any French film ever had, and was nominated for Academy Awards for Script, Direction, and Costume Design.

Part II: “I’ve Got a Great Idea for a Musical”

Broadway composer Jerry Herman saw the film with his longtime friend and secretary Sheila Mack in a theater in Los Angeles. He was in a difficult place in his life. Having written two of Broadway’s biggest hits in the mid-1960s, Hello, Dolly! and Mame, Herman spent the next 15 years creating only three shows, each of which flopped. A move to Hollywood had not been a success, either. “I…had this feeling that people didn’t want my style of writing anymore,” he wrote in his memoir Showtune. “Maybe there was no place in the musical theater for the kind of stuff I liked to write. Maybe there was no place for me.” It was a sentiment he would come back to years later in one of the Tony Awards’ most controversial and hotly debated speeches.

Herman saw the show as a musical, and immediately called his agent about the rights.

The problem was, he was not the only one to have had that thought. Far from it. New York entertainment attorney and producer John Breglio had gotten a call from Hollywood producer Allan Carr one afternoon months before, telling him to drop everything and go see the film at the Paris Theatre. “Run down,” Carr told him, Breglio recalled to me.

“So I did. There was almost nobody in the theater. I laughed my head off.”

Allan Carr

Breglio had previously helped Carr obtain the rights to a Mexican film about a group of soccer players who crashed in the Andes, which became an unexpected moneymaker in the States. And Carr—who had since produced the film adaptation of Grease—had shared with Breglio how much he wanted to produce a Broadway musical.

After watching La Cage, Breglio called Carr back. “It’s hilarious,” he told Carr. “That’s what you want to make into a musical?’ He said, ‘Yep.’”

But Carr wasn’t the first one to have thought of it, either. When Breglio dug in he discovered none other than the famed Broadway producer David Merrick had already approached Poiret, and was close to a deal. “I said to Allan, we’ve got a really tough problem here,” Breglio remembers. “We’re bidding against the most important theater producer in the world.”

John Breglio

Carr took the same approach with La Cage that he had with the Andes soccer movie—he threw staggering amounts of money at it. “He said, I give you up to one hundred thousand dollars,” said Breglio, before correcting himself—”Well, actually [Robert] Stigwood was the one who gave me the money because he had all of the money.” (Breglio had represented Stigwood for many years; Carr had more recently become his producing partner.)

“You have to remember, a hundred thousand dollars back in the late ‘70s was a lot of money,” Breglio explained. “No one had ever, ever paid a hundred thousand dollars to buy the underlying rights to something. And David Merrick was not known to spend a lot of money on anything.”

Breglio called Poiret’s agent with this offer: “Make a deal with me and I’ll have a hundred thousand dollars in a wire transfer to your account tomorrow.” Poiret agreed, and Breglio got the rights to adapt the play.

A David Merrick-produced La Cage aux Folles is only one of the La Cage that Might Have Beens. After getting the rights, Carr hired Jay Presson Allen to write the book, Mike Nichols to direct and Tommy Tune to do the choreography. Nichols was a giant at this point; he’d already been nominated for Tony Awards ten times for his direction, and won five. He’d also been nominated for Academy Awards for direction twice, and won for The Graduate.

Mike Nichols

Tommy Tune also had a Tony for his performance in Seesaw, and a total of five other nominations for stage direction (The Club, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, A Day In Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine) and choreography (Whorehouse, Hollywood/Ukraine). Allen meanwhile had written the film adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie which won Maggie Smith her first Oscar and the film adaptation of Cabaret, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, as well as the Funny Girl sequel Funny Lady.

Strangely, Carr didn’t immediately hire a composer (a fact that no doubt would have driven Herman crazy). In fact, according to Maury Yeston, at the time a relatively young composer with no Broadway credits as of yet and teaching at Yale, Allen had written some semblance of a script without one.

Yeston was yet another fan of the movie who had what he thought was an original idea to turn it into a musical. “I felt so strongly it had to be a show,” he said years later. “Everything in it seemed to need to explode in song.” He went to a family friend, Herman Levin, who had produced My Fair Lady, only to find out that he was too late, Carr had the rights.

At some point later, Yeston ran into Tune, for whom he was working on incidental music for his off-Broadway play Cloud 9. Yeston remembers asking him how he was doing. “I’m fine, but I’m going crazy,” Tune said, according to Yeston, in an interview he did in 2023 (below).

Tune confided that he was working on La Cage with Nichols and Allen. “And it’s just driving me crazy. They’re not making a deal.” And Yeston shared how much he wanted to be involved with the show. On the spot, he offered to write some sample songs, free of charge. According to his recollection, Tune gave him a copy of the script had already written on the spot. Now set in New Orleans, the show had been renamed The Queen and I.

“And I just thought, that’s the worst title I ever heard in my entire life,” Yeston said. The script was not much better. So Yeston began to muse instead on the underlying concept. “I thought, New Orleans is great,” he recalled. “I’m a jazz historian, so I knew all about all the clubs that had sprung up on Basin Street in New Orleans. There’s even a song ‘Basin street is the street where the elite often meet.’”

“And I thought, She’s a queen, and she’s the queen of New Orleans, so she’ll be the queen of Basin Street.” He wrote five songs, and played them for Tune, Nichols, Allen, and Carr at his mother’s apartment. “And they went crazy.” Yeston was hired to write the score, and the show’s title was changed to The Queen of Basin Street.

But the problem that Tune had alluded to remained. The all-powerful talent agent Sam Cohn was repping everyone but Yeston. And as one deal would get ironed out, the others he represented would get word and insist on more. Nichols proved especially difficult: “At one point Sam said to me, It’s very simple,” said Breglio. “Mike Nichols wants to make sure he gets more than anybody else.”

Meanwhile, as Yeston had already noticed, the script was not good. And the time on the rights that Carr had paid so much for was running out…

Coming Monday: Enter Barry Brown and Fritz Holt.

You can find more from me on La Cage aux Folles, including interviews with some of the actors and others here.

John Breglio also has a book on producing, I Wanna Be a Producer, that includes more reflections from him on La Cage.

Also, there’s Michel Serrault’s memoir Vous avez dit Serrault?; Jerry Herman’s memoir Showtune; Harvey Fierstein’s I Was Better Last Night; and Robert Hofler’s book on Allan Carr, Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr.

And to keep up with my series on La Cage and other interviews, subscribe below.

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Thanks for reading!

Tonight in New York, the first all-Black revival of the 1983 musical La Cage aux Folles opens at City Center. In honor of that event, today I’m remembering William Thomas, Jr., who starred in the original 1983 production of La Cage as Georges and Albin’s head of house/diva Jacob.

My post today is part of a series of interviews and articles I’ve written about La Cage aux Folles. This Pride I’m spotlighting two members of the cast and crew: Thomas and executive producer Barry Brown. (Learn more about that here.)

William Thomas, Jr. came to New York in the fall of 1971 from Columbus, Ohio, having finished a degree in sociology and then worked for a time to help low-income families maintain their homes at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority.

From the time he was a kid he’d sung in church choirs and chorales and acted in musicals. And in New York his faith and theater backgrounds frequently came together. He was first in Godspell, then the original 1976 company of the Broadway musical Your Arms Too Short To Box with God, another musical based on the Gospel of Matthew, this one built around Gospel music and with a Black cast. “The whole cast is as lively as a revival meeting that has just revived,” wrote New York Times critic Clive Barnes about the show.

Barnes also noted the similarities in subject matter to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, but gave Your Arms higher marks. “Whereas the flashy Broadway musical was all trash and glitter, [director] Miss [Vinnette] Carroll has given her work something of the emblematic simplicity of a medieval morality play.”

After the 1980 big band musical Swing failed to make it past its out of town tryout in Washington, D.C.—James Lardner of the Washington Post dubbed it “The Big Bland” but noted “there is a lot of talent lurking in this production, aching for another opening of another show,” Thomas landed a role in Paul Rudnick’s 1982 Yale spoof Poor Little Lambs, which was put on in off-Broadway in the theater at St. Peter’s Church. While judging the acting “uneven,” Times critic Frank Rich praised Thomas’ “strong work” as a poor, gay, Black, scholarship student, whom Rudnick quips is ‘’better funded than the Joffrey Ballet, Channel 13 and Muscular Dystrophy put together.’‘

(In the same breath Rich also praised the performances of two other actors: David Naughton, who had recently starred in An American Werewolf in London; and a very young Kevin Bacon, still two years away from his star turn in Footloose.)

Then came La Cage.

From the original 1983 Playbill for La Cage.

Casting director Stuart Howard remembers Thomas auditioning to play Georges and Albin’s Black house staffer, Jacob. They’d been searching for the right actor for some time. “Any Black actor who wanted an audition was allowed to audition,” Howard recalls. But no one had really grabbed them.

And in truth, it was an extremely challenging role to cast—Jacob had to have the talent to stand toe to toe with Broadway powerhouse George Hearn and Hollywood star Gene Barry; be able to do both physical comedy land the role’s many scene-stealing punchlines; and sing.

And on top of all that, the actor had to be willing to play a character that was incredibly flamboyant, indeed perhaps the most flamboyant in the entire show (which in a show full of drag queens is really saying something, honey). Getting an actor who could do all that and wanted to was never going to be easy.

But when Thomas came in, director Arthur Laurents was captivated.

“[Arthur] loved him,” Howard said. “He walked up to him and very quietly said, ‘Who are you? Why don’t I know your name?’ Because Arthur was a Tony voter for 110 years; he had a great memory. And he asked me, ‘Stuart, where do I know him from?’ And I said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know Billy.’”

Thomas got the role, and stayed with the show through 1985. 40 years later, executive producer Barry Brown remembers him well. “He was great onstage. He was a sweetheart.” Howard agrees: “He was just a wonderful human being.”

After La Cage Thomas moved to Los Angeles, where he did guest spots on various shows before becoming a regular on Frank’s Place, then had a recurring role in Stephen Bochco’s police musical Cop Rock before he landed perhaps his most famous role—that of Vanessa Huxtable’s fiancé Dabnis in the final season of The Cosby Show.

Meanwhile he continued to play organ and lead the choir at churches. Eventually he became an associate pastor, then a pastor, as did his husband Michael Kosik.

Thomas died in 2020 at 73 after a brutal year of struggling with cancer. In December I talked with Kosik about his memories of his husband and Thomas’ time on La Cage.

William Thomas, Jr. and his husband Michael Kosik

Did Bill ever talk about La Cage?

Sure!

I remember him telling me about his audition. He went in and they gave him a callback, and he went back for the callback and they said, Okay, we need you to come back a third time. And he said I can’t, I have a ticket to Columbus, I have to go visit my family. And they said, This is a Broadway show. Can you reschedule that? And he said, No.

And they said, Okay…You’re hired.

He really stuck his neck out. But at the time he was the number one television commercial actor in New York. And he had been in Godspell, I think he had been in Poor Little Lambs right before. So he was just like, I’ll get a job.

And he always had a church job. He was always an organist or choir leader at a church.

What was his experience like being in the show?

He loved doing it. The only reason he left it was he really wanted to come to LA to do television and films. But he loved doing the show. As a matter of fact, after he left the show, the guy who took over for him needed to take five weeks off, so Bill flew back and did it again. We met two days before he went back to do that.

Really?
Yeah. [After he flew to New York] We talked on the phone a couple days, but this was back in the days when you paid per minute for long distance. And I said, this is getting really expensive. I should just come out there.

So I flew out there, having known him for two days, and we spent a week in New York together. I got to see him do the show, and I got to sit backstage with the Cagelles and everybody (well it’s not really backstage, it’s downstairs, this was at the Palace Theater).

What was it like being there?

It was great. I was 23 years old and an aspiring actor, and here I was hanging out at the Palace Theater backstage with a huge Broadway hit.

There was a booth something like three stories down, and when the big musical numbers would come in, all the extra pit singers would sing from the booth. I was singing along from outside the booth, and one day one of the cast grabbed me and pulled me in. So I got to sing in the pit.

It was really great that I got to see him do it.

It sounds amazing.

I got to know George Hearn, too. We would go out for drinks to a place called Barrymore’s, and they used to have George’s picture over the cash register when you walked in. That’s how much he used to go there, when we walked in with him we would just get free drinks.

What was George like?
He’s the sweetest man. Just like you see him in an interview, that’s who he is. He’s very genuine.

Thomas with Gene Barry (L) and George Hearn (R) in La Cage aux Folles on Broadway.

His character, Bill’s, Gene and John Weiner form a fun family unit in the show.

And Bill and George were close, too.

He also talked a lot about Van Johnson [who took on the role of Georges in 1985]. He admired him so much. Bill said he had a scene with him and Van would always turn upstage so that Bill could have the moment. He said he was just the sweetest man to work with.

Bill was in such a unique position on the show. He was the only Black member of the cast, and he was playing this very flamboyant character.

Which Bill was not.

Really?

The character he played on The Cosby Show that last year, that was more of who Bill was. The over the top thing, that was him being over the top.

William Thomas, Jr. as Dabnis and Tempestt Bledsoe as Vanessa on The Cosby Show.

Did it pose any issues for Bill playing such a flamboyant, effeminate character?
No. It’s funny—Zaza was the one who was more effeminate. Bill’s character was flamboyant with his costumes and everything, but he was more full of himself. He was very grand, which I think was great, because he was the Black servant. To be the one that is so incredibly sure of himself, more than anyone else, I think it was a great choice that they went with that.

That’s a great note. Making him kind of the boss of the house played against what could have been the very problematic type of the Black servant.

Yes. And Bill had roles where he had to do that.

Would he have been out of the closet before La Cage?

Oh yeah.

I’m guessing after playing Jacob, people were likely going to assume he was gay…

What’s funny is, he was out to friends and family and everything. And I never heard him talk about it coming up when he was doing theater. But when he was on television, when he got nominated for an NAACP Image Award, he took a female friend of ours, the total beard thing.

He was not out in Hollywood. When he was on The Cosby Show especially, we couldn’t go into any gay establishments or anything because people would take pictures. His agents told us, you can’t go out of for a drink, you can’t do anything.

We’d been together for so long, we weren’t going clubbing anyway. But every once in a while, some friends would say, We should all go out! And we were like, We can’t.

I remember one time, somebody was performing in something, and we snuck in. Bill put on a fake mustache and a baseball cap.

It’s interesting to me that performing on Broadway was far enough away from Hollywood somehow that playing Jacob wouldn’t have had an impact.

Are there other memories from the show that Bill shared?

He had a nice part in the song “Cocktail Counterpart”. They originally wanted to give him a solo, a big number. That’s how you become eligible for Tonys. But it never happened. That was one disappointment for him. But there’s a lot of politics and stuff.

“Cocktail Counterpoint” from the original Broadway production of La Cage aux Folles. Thomas comes in at “It’s appalling to confess” in what becomes a round with Georges and the Dindons.

One of the other things he would talk about were the celebrities that would come backstage. My favorite is when Lucille Ball came backstage. She was holding his hand, and she said to him, “You were very funny.” And he said, “Oh my goodness, thank you. And thank you for all the lessons.” And she curtsied while she was holding his hand. He said, “Oh my God.”

She then walked away. And he was so stunned he didn’t even realize that Sid Caesar was standing right next to her.

Ha ha ha ha.
Yeah, I love that story.

I was fascinated to learn that the two of you eventually became Christian pastors.

He was the choir director at the church I’m at now years ago, way before I became a pastor. I was in the choir as a matter of fact, and I was the children’s director. And then he was also in charge of all the music for our general assemblies for all our churches in North America. So everybody knew Bill. Walking ten feet with Bill at the general assembly without getting stopped was impossible. And he would never just say hey and keep walking. He would stop and talk and talk with you.

Then he got his own church, and eventually after that I became pastor here, so we both were pastors of churches. He was pastor of a church when he died.

The Rev. Dr. William Thomas, Jr., with some fantastic liturgical footwear.

It sounds like his faith was always a big part of his life.

Oh yeah. He was raised in the same denomination that we’re both in now, and even when he was a teenager he was in charge of the youth choir, because he could play the piano. If the organist was sick, they’d say, Bill, go play. His mom belonged to the same church that he went to when he was a little boy up until the day she died.

The fact that he and you were gay never felt inconsistent with your Christianity?

No no no. You know, there’s different ways of reading the Scriptures. A lot of the things that people read as anti-gay in the Bible are more cultural at the time. It didn’t have to do with the Word of God, that’s not what it was about.

And we believe that God created us all. We know that we didn’t choose to be gay; God created us gay. And who are we to say there’s something wrong with that?

In terms of the Christian community, when did he or you two come out?

They knew we were gay day one. This church has been open and affirming forever.

That’s amazing.

Yeah, everybody knew he was gay from the beginning, and then everybody knew I was gay because I was with Bill when I joined. Even all the kids, they grew up knowing that Bill and I were a couple and because they’d always known us they never questioned it. “They’re a couple like mommy and daddy.” Okay.

I think it’s interesting that an actor on La Cage becomes a pastor, because the show has such a positive message about humanity and gay people. It feels very consistent.

For him and for you was the material of the show important?

Yes. In the 80s, you just didn’t see gay people in the media, on television, in films. Or if you did it was usually a negative thing. So not only was this present but it was celebrated. It won best musical. People still sing I am “What I Am.”

What would you want people who never saw the show to remember about Bill?

He was probably one of the greatest people I ever met. That’s hard for me to say—I recently got remarried, and he’s wonderful too! But Bill is just one of the kindest, most generous people. Everybody he met and whose life he touched thought the same thing. After Bill died a lot of people would say to me, Bill could always make me feel like I was the only person in the room. Like we’d be at a party and it was like I was the only one there, because he genuinely cared about what I was saying.

He really was one of the most giving, kind, wonderful people in the world.

And he was really proud of being a part of such a groundbreaking experience. He knew that it was introducing a positive reflection of gay people into the larger community in a way that other media hadn’t been able to do. And he was really proud that he was part of that.

I think young people might look at La Cage and go, Well what’s the big deal? Why does one have to pretend they’re a woman? Why can’t they just say he has gay parents? They probably all know somebody who has same sex parents.

But back in the day that was very different. You don’t understand what it was like at the time this was out. I think the show made gay people feel seen for the first time, like who we are.

Bill really was proud to be a part of something that helped to change the way that people looked at gay people. It was really something that made a difference.

William Thomas, Jr. and Michael Kosik.

Thanks so much to Michael Kosik for sharing his memories and also the wonderful photos of he and Bill.

Thanks as well to everyone in the cast, crew and extended family of La Cage that I’ve spoken to. Your stories have inspired me in my own life, and I know they will inspire others, as well.

Coming Next: BarrynFritz.

This week, New York City Center’s Encores! begins an all-Black revival of La Cage aux Folles, the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical about a gay couple who run a drag nightclub. Starring Billy Porter and Wayne Brady, the show follows the drag queen Albin and his husband/club owner Georges as they try to hide their sexual identities so that their straight son Jean-Michel can convince his fiancé’s conservative parents that he’ll be a good husband for her.

Today, the idea of a show about a married gay couple isn’t likely to draw a lot of attention. But in 1983 when the show was produced, it was a huge swing. Director Arthur Laurents was so concerned about how straight people would react to the show that he refused to allow the leads to kiss, even at the end. Just before the show opened in Boston, the creative team—which included book writer Harvey Fierstein and composer Jerry Herman—suddenly wondered if they had lost their minds thinking a show about a drag queen and his partner could ever be a success.

To everyone’s delight—most especially audiences—the show was a smash. La Cage ran over four years on Broadway and won Tonys for Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, Leading Actor, Best Direction and Best Costume Design. Each night the actors, most of whom were gay themselves, were stunned by the ovations they received. “I left every night thinking Wow, I think I was part of something that changed what people think about homosexuals,” said Dennis Callahan, who played one of the 12 actors in the show who played the drag club’s performers, the Cagelles.

More than just a hit, La Cage was the culmination of decades of work by queer people fighting for their rights in society, and of LGBTQ stories in the theater. Drag in fact constitutes one of the oldest traditions in New York theater.

La Cage is notable in another way, too. At the very moment that it became a sensation and embodied the progress that had been accomplished for queer people and stories, the AIDS crisis hit, sweeping all of that joy, acceptance and safety away from the gay community again. Productions of La Cage outside New York faltered. Audiences in some places expressed anxiety about the possibility of having to sit next to someone who might be sick. And some in the gay community started to interpret the show’s hopefulness and playfulness as a different kind of closet, the boldness of its concept lost in the face of the sickness and rejection the gay community were enduring.

The cast of La Cage, like every other cast on Broadway, suddenly found itself living in fear of what might happen to themselves and each other, of who might get sick next and how to avoid getting it. Apocryphal but untrue stories about the show say that half the cast died of AIDS. In fact, the show did lose people, tremendous artists like hair designer Teddy Azar and cast members David Cahn and John Dolf. Near the show’s conclusion they also lost their beloved stage manager and co-executive producer Fritz Holt.

But somehow the people involved with La Cage refused to be shut down by the tragedy that stalked their community. They took the joy they got out of doing the show and being together and put it at the service of the Broadway community, doing fundraisers for HIV/AIDS, including the first major celebrity fundraiser in New York (the city’s second major fund raiser overall).

They weren’t the only company to raise money for AIDS/HIV research and relief, not by a long shot. But their efforts made a huge difference, and their work can be directly traced to the creation of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

40+ years on from its debut on Broadway, La Cage may seem like one of many great queer Broadway shows. In fact it stood at a peak of the climb that queer artists and people had been on for generations, and expressed the joy and freedom that queer people felt at getting there. And with the rise of AIDS, the cast and crew of La Cage turned that seemingly boundless joy into fuel to help the Broadway community and others find comfort and strength.

For the last few years I’ve been interviewing members of the cast and crew of the original 1983 Broadway production. And as we welcome the City Center revival and celebrate Pride, I’m going to post some of the material from those interviews here.

I’m going to focus on two people in particular. The first is the late William Thomas, Jr.

Thomas (above left) played Jacob, Georges and Albin’s flamboyant houseboy. He was the only Black member of the original cast. As director Robert O’Hara and the cast and creative team of the City Center revival reimagine La Cage as a story of Black queer joy, it’s fitting to remember him.

The second is the show’s co-executive producer Barry Brown (above). Despite producing a number of massively successful Broadway shows, including not only La Cage but a number of the Gypsy revivals, Brown is probably the least widely known of the men who created La Cage. He’s written no books about his life and hasn’t gotten much press coverage.

But in many ways his story is the story of La Cage—he and Fritz Holt were not only producing partners, they were a couple. And talking to him about his work on the show, it’s clear it was as special an experience for he and Holt as it was for the rest of the cast and crew.

While Holt was still alive the two produced the celebrity fundraiser for HIV/AIDS at the Metropolitan Opera. And after Holt died and La Cage closed, Brown became the go-to person for creating similar first-of-their-kind fundraisers around the country. He would be one of the founding members of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. And he stayed with the organization for almost 40 years.

In Pride Month we raise up the people who have fought for our rights and shown us a path forward. In my opinion the entire cast and crew of La Cage fit in that category. And over the next couple weeks I want to share with you two of those stories.

Coming Later This Week: Michael Kosik, partner of William Thomas, Jr.’s, remembers his late husband’s favorite Georges, the La Cage audition he refused to do, his pride in the show, and how he reconciled being gay with his later work as a Christian pastor.

Beyond the normal horse race of it all, a lot of the conversation around the Tonys this year has focused on some pretty disappointing things—Patti LuPone’s mean-spirited comments to the New Yorker; frustration that Boop and Smash are not being allowed to perform, which is horrible for the business and also dumb—the opening number of Act II of Boop is exactly the kind of number that Tony Award show watchers long for.

But the thing that has held my attention the most since it was announced is the fact that Harvey Fierstein will be receiving a special Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tonys tonight. A while ago I interviewed a number of the original Cagelles from Fierstein’s 1983 show La Cage aux Folles for a story for Dance Magazine. (A longer version of that piece was actually the inspiration for this Substack.) Prior to those conversations, I knew Fierstein mostly for his smart humor, his gravelly voice and his very funny turns in drag.

But in fact he’s spent most of his life breaking ground as an openly gay writer and performer, telling stories about being gay in a way unlike anyone else. Torch Song Trilogy, which launched him into the broader public’s consciousness and won multiple Tonys when it transferred to Broadway, was a revelation. It cast off that thunder blanket of shame and self-hatred in which shows like Boys in the Band had smothered queer experience, in favor of pathos, longing, and humor that felt true. Trilogy was a show that let gay men see and celebrate themselves, right down to the kinds of experiences and feelings they might have in a dark room, while also not putting straight audiences off.

This is the genius of Fierstein then and now: He finds a way of telling truth, without alienating those who might find it challenging. Where others would lead with pain or later rage­­­, Fierstein always found room for connection and joy.

And that’s been true for his life as a public figure, as well. Case in point: In 1983, as La Cage was mounting its Tony campaign, Fierstein did an interview with Barbara Walters on 20/20. It’s pretty wild. Walters seems unsure at times how even to talk to a gay man. “What is like to be a homosexual?”, she asks around 4:45 below, as though he were some sort of alien from another planet. And you can see some of that surprise dance across Fierstein’s face as he tries to take that in. But his response is to engage with her, and to engage in a way that defuses her discomfort and even lifts her up with his acceptance of her.

It’s the very thing that made him perfect to bring on to write the book of La Cage. Today a show about a gay couple who run a drag club and have a son should not be at all shocking. But in 1983, just before the curtain went up on their first preview in Boston, La Cage book writer Fierstein, composer/lyricist Jerry Herman, and director Arthur Laurents feared the show was going to get them run out of town. It was a big swing.

Alongside Herman’s gorgeous melodies, part of the genius behind the show’s sucecess is Fierstein’s use of straight married life comic tropes, like the wife who feels overlooked by her husband, or the son who is easily embarrassed by his mom, to enable straight audiences to immediately feel comfortable in this world and with these characters. Some in the gay community (including Fierstein) wanted the show to go further in its queerness. But looking back what’s much more striking is that it got away with some of the raunchy jokes that Fierstein wrote, like the male statue on the end table whose penis is a cigarette lighter, as well as some of the affection that it showed. Gene Barry, who plays Georges, expressed anxiety that people would think he was gay for playing the role. But you can’t hear him sing “Song on the Sand” and not feel in your bones how much these two men love each other. (In his memoir Fierstein talks about watching an older straight couple take one another’s hand during that song at that Boston preview. He and the others knew then and there that they were going to be okay.

Within a few months of her interview with Fierstein, Walters interviewed Herman. She asks at the beginning, “Why doesn’t anyone know who you are, outside of the business?”

Herman responds by talking about being private and preferring his work to speak for itself. But underneath all that is a telling difference between Fierstein and most others on Broadway in the 80s: he was out, and they were not. At the opening night party for La Cage, the openly gay Village Voice reporter Arthur Bell famously asked Herman if the man who had just produced one of the most powerful anthems of gay life “I Am What I Am” could possibly not be gay himself. And Herman refused to take the bait. Just because he wrote about being gay didn’t mean he was. Except of course it did.

This is the other thing about Fierstein that is so important to recognize now. People look at Stonewall as this great moment when suddenly everyone was able to come out. But that’s not how it worked for a lot of people, including within the Broadway community.

Fierstein wrote about his life and world. He was going to be seen as gay whether he denied it or not. And somehow he had the courage to continue to be transparent even as he achieved great success and faced crowds that were uncomfortable with knowing this about him. There’s that moment in the interview he did with Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show where he mentions his lover. Moments later a couple in the crowd start tittering, in a way that suggests they don’t have any idea what to do with this information and so perhaps want to act like it was a joke. Rather than ignore it, Fierstein engages, in a characteristically welcoming, funny way. “I think a woman just realized I was gay,” he says. “These shoes didn’t tell you?”

He goes on into a very funny riff about having gone to an “all gay high school” and being taught there how to be gay, which absolutely wins the audience over.

During the interview, Rivers praises him for being so comfortable with himself. “You are so open about your homosexuality,” she says. “You’re so relaxed.” And that’s the thing with Harvey—in an era where being out “off-campus” was enormously fraught for most in the Broadway community, he somehow was able to convey a sense of ease and laughter about himself in public. In doing so, he helped others—straight and queer—feel about homosexuality exactly how he seemed to feel about it for himself: as something that was normal (and delightful). And he showed there were other ways forward for gay people in the Broadway community. You might want to keep your identity private within the community. Most still did for many years to come). But Harvey showed you didn’t have to. There was joy to be found in being open about yourself, even a sense of welcome. And he did all this in such an effortless way that the courage behind what he was doing, as well as the actual work of it, the keen sense of moving the community forward boldly is easy to miss.

In March, Fierstein announced on social media that his entire body of work has been banned from production at the Kennedy Center. Bravo to the American Theater Wing and Broadway League for responding by celebrating his achivements in this way and giving him a platform with which to speak. We who are queer are who we are today in part of because of the grace, the wisdom and the laughter with which he has led his life and told his stories (which include so many others that I should talk about and haven’t—most especially Casa Valentina).

Without many even knowing that he was doing it, Harvey Fierstein pushed open doors and enabled a greater space for LGBTQ people in this country and in life. And our lives and the theater are so much the better for it.

For some time now I’ve been obsessed with the making of the 1983 Tony-Award winning musical, La Cage Aux Folles. It was a groundbreaking work, the first mainstream musical to put at its center a gay married couple, who are treated not with derision but acceptance and dignity. And it was an enormous hit, which is shocking not only because it was so far ahead of its time in subject matter, but because it came to Broadway precisely as AIDS was first coming into the public consciousness.

The cast and crew of La Cage was very involved in fund raising efforts to help people who got sick. Their producers Barry Brown and Fritz Holt hosted the first major celebrity gala at the Metropolitan Opera. The show’s cast members did benefits constantly and all over the place. Some of those benefits continue to this day.

A number of the creatives involved in La Cage have either written books themselves—book writer Harvey Fierstein, composer/lyricist Jerry Herman, director Arthur Laurents—or in the case of executive producer Allan Carr, been the subject of them.

But there are so many other people that made La Cage so special. And among them are the amazing 10 men and 2 women who sang and danced in drag as the Cagelles.

I reached out to Dance Magazine last fall wondering if they’d be open to a sort of oral history of La Cage from the point of view of some of the Cagelles, as a way of celebrating their work on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the show. To my great happiness, they said yes, and three wonderful performers from the show, David Engel, Dennis Callahan, and Dan O’Grady, agreed to talk to me.

That article came out in mid-March. (Check it out!) But as I was writing it, I felt like I was perhaps not giving David, Dennis, and Dan the space they deserved. So below you’ll find a lot more. I hope at the very least it brings back a lot of happy memories for the guys, their fellow Cagelles and everyone in the La Cage family.

Special thanks to David Engel, who gave me virtually all of the photos you’ll see here. They are tremendous!

Anything good in the text comes from the guys and their generosity. Any errors are absolutely my own.

Something About Sharing, Something About Always

August of last year marked the 40^th anniversary of the opening of the groundbreaking musical La Cage aux Folles on Broadway. As a way of celebrating the occasion, members of the original Cagelles—the 10 male and 2 female dancer/performers who formed the 12-person drag ensemble at the heart of the show—organized a series of events in conjunction with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS annual fall Flea Market.

It was fitting that the group would decide to use that occasion of their reunion to raise money to help find a cure for HIV/AIDS. La Cage took Broadway by storm at almost exactly the same moment that news reports began to speak of a mysterious “gay plague.” And as that plague swept down upon Broadway companies, including their own, the Cagelles took it upon themselves to organize endless benefits, some of which continue to this day.

Most of the 10 gay men cast as Cagelles were little more than kids when they joined the show. These are some of their stories.

The Tiniest Threads

Dan O’Grady (Odette) : I started dancing professionally when I was in high school. In my junior year I was cast at the St. Louis Muny Opera, which is a local outdoor summer theater that hires local chorus and then brings in stars. That’s how I got my Equity card.

I graduated from high school the next year and went to SUNY-Purchase for a year. I got into their ballet program, and auditioned in New York all the time. That summer, I was cast in the touring company of Peter Pan. I did that and then got La Cage the following Spring.

David Engel (Hanna from Hamburg): In junior high I wanted to sing, I got into choir, and I had this soprano voice. I modeled my voice after Julie Andrews, and I was shamed for it by the choir director. “You’re a boy, you should sing like a man.” So I shut up completely. I got out of choir and wouldn’t go back.

But then in my junior year of high school someone dragged me into the theater department and I found out I was a natural. I went to college, but then immediately started auditioning for things. I did dinner theater near Disneyland, TV variety shows, the film Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. But I was completely untrained. I was just putting myself out there. That I even got Whorehouse was ridiculous.

David Engel as Hanna.

Dennis Callahan (Monique): I grew up in Missouri. Boys didn’t dance there. So I didn’t really start dancing until I was 18. I went to the all-girls Stevens College in Columbia, Missouri. I had done a lot of sports, so I was sort of coordinated, but I had zero experience. But they took me on the basis of my body. They were desperate for men to be in their productions, basically, and I could imitate well.

It was an incredible education. The dance teachers there were really top notch.  A week after I graduated I went into rehearsal at Muny Opera—Dan and I were sort of in different casts, but I was aware of him and also Leslie Stevens, who was the original Anne. And after that I had two years touring on Evita.

A Little Mascara

DC:  I think there were between 800 and 1000 at the original open call. We had the advantage that Scott Salmon, who was the choreographer, was not a New York person. He had worked on shows in New York, but he had primarily been in Los Angeles, and he didn’t know anybody. So it was really like a clean slate as far as what he was seeing at these auditions. And Scott was a doll—he was a sweet, sweet man. I remember from the auditions, when you would go in and sing for him, he had this smile on his face the whole time. He wasn’t judging you, he was just happy you were there.

DE: I was only being seen for Jean-Michel. I’m the only person that they brought out from L.A. I went through at last three more auditions in New York. They kept calling me back, and then they said we need to see you dance and we actually need to see you in drag, because at the end of the show they wanted Jean-Michel in drag. They said, Can you come to the final dance call? Everybody else had learned all this choreography. I learned it on the spot.

I actually made a skirt, too, and I had this blouse that was belted. They said, we need to see your legs, and I was able to take the skirt off. The blouse was long enough. It was so cute.

DO: It got down to maybe 25 of us at the end, and they said come to the Lund-Fontanne on whatever day it was, we’re going to put you in makeup and costumes. And I had never done any drag at all, it had never really interested me. But I had these friends, Bobby Grayson and Guy Stroman—Guy was one of the original Forever Plaid guys, and Bobby is a hair and make-up artist, he does all the celebrities. And Bobby offered to do my hair and make-up for the final call back. So I decided I was going to show up and drag.

I stayed at their apartment that night, and we got up really early and they did my hair and make-up, and put nails on me. It was hilarious, really, really funny. When I got to the cab, the cab driver got out, opened the door for me, called me Ma’am. Then I went into the Lund-Fontanne, and [executive producer] Fritz Holt was there, [director] Arthur Laurents, [executive producer] Barry Brown. And they didn’t know who I was when I walked in. No one else arrived in drag.

Dan O’Grady as Odette.

DC: They told us to bring dresses and heels, then they sat us down and put us in full drag. All of a sudden we were watching ourselves become our mothers. And they paid a lot of attention in that final callback to how our jaws were shaped, and how much space we had between our eyes and your eyebrows. There were no really square-jawed people, and none of us had really furrowed, heavy brows. That was a big factor, how were these 12 guys going to appear, would they be able to pass as women?

From 10 in the morning to 4 or 5 in the afternoon, we did all of the dancing like that, and we had to sing our original audition numbers. My audition song was “I Don’t Remember Christmas,” which is a really masculine song, but then I had to get up and sing it in drag.

DE: [At the end] basically it was like the end of A Chorus Line. We were all lined up across the stage. I remember I was fully stage left—I kind of put myself there, because I knew they weren’t looking at me for this, they were still looking at me for Jean-Michel.

DC: At the end of this long day, we were 12 and 12 across the stage. I remember looking down across the aisle and thinking those are the people who are going to get hired, that’s the side that I want to be on, and I wasn’t.

Then at the very last minute, they said, Dennis would you switch with someone on the other side. And the two of us had to walk by each other. It was intense. And I switched to stage right, then they said, Everybody on stage left, thank you very much.

DE: And then they said to everyone else, “Rehearsals start on this date, Congratulations. And everybody’s jumping up and down screaming, and I’m like What’s happening? What’s going on?

And Arthur comes down to where I was, and he says, I know we brought you here for Jean-Michel, but we actually need somebody who’s strong in the chorus who can also cover Jean-Michel. And we would like to give you a little featured part.

I was so disappointed. *laughs*

It was my first Broadway show, my first Broadway audition, and I get it and I’m like *sigh* Okay.

I wouldn’t have it had any other way. I’m so happy where I landed. It was great to be a Cagelle.

DC: After the others left, they had the 12 of us gather around the piano and sing “There’s no Business like Show Business” in real short clipped piano voices. We sang the whole first chorus like that. (Composer) Jerry Herman said, This is the style of La Cage’s opening song, “We are What We Are.”

It was such a cool moment to be around the piano with Jerry and (music director) Don Pippin, all of us in drag.

Dennis Callahan as Monique.

Not a Place We Have to Hide

DE: The very first day of rehearsal, Arthur Laurents said, we are not doing this apologetically. We are proudly playing these roles.

Arthur Laurents in rehearsals for La Cage.

DO: He gave us all storylines. We weren’t just playing drag queens, everyone had a story. Some were more developed than others, but we all had a bit of one. Arthur really instilled in us that we were important to the story, and that it was important that we comported ourselves onstage with dignity. It made it less for me about drag and more about integrity.

DC: Though I don’t think any of us had any experience doing drag, I don’t think any Cagelle would say it was hard. The atmosphere in the room was so supportive and nurturing that none of us felt any fear of being judged. There was never anything negative, it was all positive.

DO: I remember Arthur working with George Hearn (Albin), a straight man, on “I Am What I Am.” I was one of the Cagelles on stage every night during that song. And the amount of pride and dignity that Arthur conveyed not just to George but all of us was very powerful. It moves me even just to think of it now. I felt so accepted in that world.

DC: The Cagelles were given the last bow. When does that ever happen? That was something. We all lined up, our backs were to the audience. One after another we took off our coats and our wigs and threw them in this cart as it walked by, and then our arms went straight up into the air and we turned around. It was always such a rush, a total transformation. We each took a humble bow as ourselves, the ten men and two women. The sound of the audience was unbelievable.

Count All the Loves that Have Loved You

DO: Scott Salmon was absolutely one of the loveliest human beings I ever met. Beyond a kind person, he was very generous. He worked with our limits and our strengths. There are a lot of choreographers who will capitalize on shame and humiliation to motivate a dancer. That was not at all how Scott worked. He really believed that performers need to be built up. Arthur was the same way. [Book writer] Harvey [Fierstein] and Jerry were also part of our rehearsal process, and they were great.

DE: Executive producer and stage manager Fritz Holt was just adored by all of us. Everybody loved Fritz. He was our stage manager for a while and he was executive producer, and he was, I don’t know, Santa Claus. He was the heart and soul of that show.

At the table read, usually everybody goes around and introduces themselves. But for ours instead of that Fritz went around and put his hands on each person’s shoulder and talked about them—not just the creatives; he went to every single person and stood by them and spoke about them. All of us. He was telling people about our careers and what we had done prior to that, just introducing us. That’s how we met him. He was just a joyous human being. He made everyone feel important.

Fritz Holt and Arthur Laurents.

DC: George Hearn and Gene Barry (Georges) were two straight men who from the beginning embraced what they were doing. Gene had a little trouble getting into it; it’s a bit of a thankless role, you know? It’s all about Zaza, all about George Hearn. And I think he had done a Broadway show before, but after having been on a TV set and playing Bat Masterson for most of his life, he was so unfamiliar. It was a little overwhelming.

But I must say he rose to the occasion, he really did. In “Song in the Sand” and “Look Over There” he has the most romantic moment and the most telling theatrical moment in the show. I think he realized that as time went on.

I always remember their last moment, when they’re walking upstage shoulder to shoulder, and George would take Gene’s hand and wrap his arm around his waist as the lights faded. It was such a beautiful moment. It was just right.

George Hearn and Gene Barry.

DO: Linda Haberman (Bitelle) was really inspirational to me. I just couldn’t believe that I was in the same line as an original cast member of Dancin’. I was not at the same level, mind you, I was a child. But it felt good. And I learned a lot from her about professionalism, working hard, dancing full out every single time.

Linda Haberman as Bitelle.

Also Mark Waldrop (Tabarro), Jennifer Smith (Colette), who was one of the townsfolk and then took over as Anne when Leslie Stevens left. Jennifer was and continues to be one of the hardest working people in the world. She knows what she does well and she moved toward her challenges rather than avoiding them. I thought I had to sort of veil areas of technique where I wasn’t as strong. She was like, No, you need to embrace that shit. You need to move towards it. I learned a lot from her.

DE: One of the things they did right off the bat was, once we got the great reviews in Boston, they brought the twelve of us into the ladies lounge of the Colonial Theater, this glorious rococo gold-leafed room, and they said, We are giving you guys a name. We’re calling you “the Cagelles.” At the time I thought, What a dumb name. I really did, I thought, You can’t think of something cleverer than “Cag-elles?” *laughs* 

Then they said, We would like to double your salary. And they did. They wanted to keep us together.

DC: When the show closed in 1987, out of an original cast of 35 people I would guess that 23 or 25 were still there. Which tells you, we were treated like gold. Every six months we received an extension and we got a raise in salary. From the first day, we just had a feeling of family that was so special.

Sometimes Sweet and Sometimes Bitter

DO: We liked to entertain ourselves. We would put on little shows or do little things just to amuse ourselves. Madonna was getting big right then, and she had some kind of video contest for one of her songs, I think it was “True Blue.” David Engel had all or most of us do this little video that he submitted.

DE: We were such a fricking hit. We were sitting fat and happy in a run, and we knew we would be there for a while. So we would entertain each other all the time. We had a whole warm up area in the basement of the Palace, and at intermission, we’d dress up, we’d be ridiculous. We just kept creating and playing. We were always making shows. I was part of this trio called the Miss Haps, we were beauty pageant contestants, two guys and a girl singing three part harmony, but we put the girl on the bottom part. We wore these bathing suits with paunches and tall beehives. We had really funny names.

The Miss Haps.

We would do it for our own parties, and then we started doing it at clubs.

It was the best of times. And it was the worst of times.

DO: I first started hearing about the “gay cancer” when we were in Boston. Nobody knew what it was. It was the summer of ‘83; the New York Times hadn’t even put the words AIDS in print. You kind of heard a little bit about it here and there, but not much. It was kind of more a San Francisco thing.

DE: So little was known. I remember Gene Barry was concerned about breathing the same air with all these gay people. He wouldn’t put himself in a small room with us. He was vocal about that. AIDS was so new. So little was known.

I myself, if I went to a gay bar, I would hold my breath. I don’t ever remember feeling in danger within the cast. You felt safe. But I felt like I was in danger outside the group. You just didn’t know.

It was everywhere, and if you tested positive, it was a death sentence, definitely. You knew it was, and you could go quick. I remember visiting David Cahn (Chantal) in the hospital. He had had a stroke or seizure or something, he couldn’t talk. It was not even that long after he left the show. And then he died right after that, and you wished it for him.

DO: I think David [Cahn] was the first of us Cagelles who got sick and left, and then John Dolf (Nicole). David and I were good friends in Boston, I actually understudied him as the opera singing Cagelle. And I sat next to John Dolf for 2 ½ years in our dressing room.

DC: I don’t remember any conversation between the rest of us about the boys being sick. It just wasn’t talked about. It’s odd to think about now; now it would all be out there. But I think it was sort of a feeling of if they wanted to talk about it they would, and they’re not, so neither should we. And maybe there was also a fear.

When we lost Larry Lynd (Monique) in the Los Angeles company, I remember them assembling us before the show and saying We’ve lost Larry. All of us knew who he was, because we always had parties where you would meet the other casts, and we saw their last run through.

It loomed large.

DO: We felt the loss from the inside, and I think that’s what sort of led us to start thinking about the Easter Bonnet competition. We were just kind of doing it for ourselves, dressing up and being ridiculous. And then we decided to do these Easter bonnets. Howard Crabtree and the other costume folks did all these silly bonnets, and we had folks donate. In the beginning it was just the cast, the crew, and the orchestra.

DE: We did the Easter Bonnet pageant in the basement, we did a Queen of Hearts pageant for Valentine’s Day, both just among ourselves, and raised money for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Then the next year we decided to bring the Easter Bonnet pageant up onto the stage and invited other casts to come— A Chorus Line, Cats, there were a few companies. I remember when they flipped over the cards at the end we had raised seventeen thousand dollars. I was sobbing, sobbing.

The Easter Bonnet competition has continued ever since the Cagelles started it. Here’s a photo from last year’s celebration.

DC: We were involved in a lot of things. Early on, Fritz and Barry Brown organized an AIDS gala at the Met, all kinds of prominent stars were there. It was one of the early things like that, and it was fantastic.

One night after the show three of us, David Scala (Phaedra), Sam Singhaus (Clo-Clo) and myself went to Marie’s Crisis and other piano bars in the Village. It was a benefit for something. We did “Hey Big Spender,” I think, a little bit of “We Are What We Are,” a couple other numbers. And we sang live and had these little lilac dresses on that we bought down in Chinatown.

DO: I think we needed a sense of agency.  Because there was no hope. There really wasn’t. AZT wasn’t even a thing at that point. Our friends were dying, and we couldn’t do anything about it. But we could dress up and act silly and ask people for money.

DC: Teddy Azar was our make-up and wig designer. He had done a lot of work on Broadway, he had done 42nd Street. He was really talented, instrumental in the whole look of the show make-up and wig wise. And he was one of the first in the company to come down with AIDS.

He was at St. Vincent’s, and David, Sam and I got some nurse drag with these giant hypodermic needles and resuscitation devices, just ridiculous stuff, and we went down there.

It was the first time any of us had been on that ward. It was pretty shocking. But to walk into Teddy’s room and see his face lighten up…

People who worked there came up to us and said, Could you please come bring some of this joy into some of the other rooms? And we went in and out of these rooms, these three big old drag queens in nurse drag, and it was joyous. The whole thing was joyous.

Fritz Holt and Teddy Azar.

DE: I had plenty of hard losses, but the hardest was Fritz. They pulled us all together to let us know that Fritz was in the hospital, and then my goodness, a week later we got the call, Come in to the theater. I remember it being one of those days like 9/11 where it was pristinely beautiful. I was cursing the weather. I was like, How dare it be sunny and beautiful out.

We got to the theater. We all gathered downstairs, and they told us. And we just cried and cried. Then we left to go to our dressing rooms to get ready. And I remember none of us spoke. We just did our make-up. And you’d hear sniffling and crying, and then we’d all start crying. You couldn’t keep the make-up on. We were all just sobbing through it.

Without speaking we all went up onto the stage. They dedicated the performance to Fritz, and we silently got in place, because the curtain rises to us. And one by one we turn around in the opening number and we all start singing “We Are What We Are.” But then one by one voices are dropping out. We just couldn’t sing. We were all crying. The cast members in the wings on both sides were singing for us, trying to keep it going.

It’s so hard for me to talk about it still. I remember telling this story for Ghost Lights [an upcoming documentary] and I couldn’t get through it. I put my arms out to the side, the way that we did on stage, and I was going ‘We are what we are,’ trying to show them how we were singing, and I was crying.

That whole show we didn’t talk. We did all we could just to get through it.

It was a bad time.

Hey World, We Are What We Are

DC: We had a very shallow orchestra pit at the Palace, which meant you had a real connection with the audience when you were on stage. We would come out in the opening number and our backs would be to the audience. And when we would turn around one by one, you could feel physically this sort of crossed arm, furrowed brow feeling from the audience. Because AIDS had just started. They were probably wondering if maybe we’re too close, we’re going to get it.

By the end of the show those same faces were leaning into the stage, wide-eyed. I left every night thinking Wow, I think I was part of something that changed what people think about homosexuals.

DE: Arthur and Jerry were out gay men, but they weren’t public figures like Harvey was. You see Harvey on The Tonight Show when he says “I’ve got a lover at home” and the audience is like, snickering. Because it’s shocking. Except for like, a Quentin Crisp, nobody else was being out. But Harvey was.

This is the clip of him on that Tonight Show. Harvey is funny, at home with himself, and completely fearless.

Boy, I was stealth in public. In the theater world I was out and it was fine, but otherwise I knew how to blend in and pass for straight. You could be gay in the theater world, but publicly people just weren’t out.

I remember getting asked to host something at some gay bar in Jersey. And I apologized there, I said to them, I’m not really gay, I just play one on stage, or something like that. This is at a gay bar. Later I was like, What was I thinking? I remember I had to get comfortable with being out publicly pretty quickly. 

DC: I came from a family that was so supportive. My mom and dad raised 5 kids, and I was the youngest, and from the beginning they saw something in me. They would take me to the Muny Opera, to the Starlight in Kansas City, and nurtured that in me. 

But at the same time I didn’t ever feel like I needed to tell them I was gay. I thought the words and the situation would hurt them. And they knew.

When they saw the show, that was my way of being able to tell them and show them that I was going to be okay.

DE: I came out to my mom when I was 18, and she really struggled with it. She couldn’t understand what she had done wrong. It was La Cage that turned her around. She said that it let her know that you can have love and family being gay. She became the proudest P-Flag waving mother ever. She would tell everybody, “I wish all my kids were gay.” *laughs*

She became a mother to all of my gay friends that had parents that disowned them. They adored her, and she loved all of them.

Arthur Laurents, Jerry Herman, and Harvey Fierstein.

DO: La Cage changed my life. I got to work with Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman and Arthur Laurents and Fritz Holt and Barry Brown and Don Pippin, and George Hearn and Gene Barry and Merle Louise, with whom I later did the original company of Kiss of the Spider Woman. The work ethic, the creativity, and the artistry was like nothing I had ever been exposed to. At the time I didn’t think of myself as a serious artist, I thought of myself as you know, a chorus boy. And that was fine, I was a kid. But later I came to appreciate what they instilled in me, the work ethic, the importance of taking my work seriously.

I can’t say I was always a serious person in La Cage. I was young and I was dumb and I did a lot of dumb things that people did in the ‘80s. But I learned from them, and people were incredibly kind and patient.

DC: At the 40-year reunion that we just had in Times Square, we sang “The Best of Times.” We were swaying back and forth. And there were two older gentleman sitting next to each other in the audience, and they were bawling. And I thought God, this show affected more people than we will ever know.

It’s so special to have been a part of something like that. It was the reason that I never really wanted to pursue any show after that. I thought, What am I going to go do, Cats? Nothing’s going to compare to that feeling of making a difference.

The cast of La Cage Aux Folles.

I cannot thank David Engel, Dennis Callahan, and Dan O’Grady enough for their willingness to talk to me about La Cage, and at great length, and to the others from the show that have also agreed to speak with me since. I feel incredibly humbled at the stories they’ve shared and the trust they all have shown me. I hope they feel like this piece gives some voice to their experiences.

Georges sings in “Look Over There”—

How often is someone concerned
With the tiniest thread of your life?
Concerned with whatever you feel
And whatever you touch?

In the midst of both their own success and a devastating pandemic that most people turned away from, the Cagelles and the cast and crew of La Cage stayed concerned with the threads of so many other people’s lives, and continue to do so to this day.

To them, with gratitude for their humor, their generosity, and their lives.