In the summer of 2024, I had the pleasure of watching Broadway’s first openly gay musical, La Cage aux Folles, and its most recent openly gay musical, A Strange Loop, 2 days apart. Both musicals took home the Tony Award for Best Musical in their respective debut seasons on Broadway, La Cage in 1984 and A Strange Loop in 2022. While these musicals share groundbreaking tendencies in the realm of musical theater, the shows could not be more different. Seeing these two shows two days apart gave me whiplash. It was astonishing to see how much queer theater has evolved over the last 40 years, and experiencing these musicals back-to-back allowed me to revel in the progress that has been made.
La Cage aux Folles is an adaptation of a French boulevard comedy play — a boulevard comedy is a style of play, very popular in France at the time, which is very lighthearted with simple characters and stories, and doesn’t seek to challenge preconceived notions or be remotely controversial. It tends to include such tropes as a man having to juggle his wife and mistress being in the same place at the same time. La Cage originated as a boulevard comedy. It tells the story of a gay couple, Georges and Albin, who have a son who brings home his fiancée, the daughter of Dindon, the leader of the hyper-conservative movement. Chaos, of course, ensues. The original French play was quite popular, and sparked an even more popular international film adaptation, which led to Jerry Herman wanting to adapt the story. It evolved such that Georges and Albin became owners of a drag club, but the core conflict of the show remained the same.
A Strange Loop is far from a boulevard comedy — if it can be considered a comedy at all. It certainly has its comedic moments, with Usher’s personified thoughts bashing him ceaselessly. A musical about a queer, black writer writing a musical about a queer, black writer writing a musical about… The musical bends the mind with its nested story; the audience is left wondering what elements of this show actually occur in the “real” character’s plot, and which occur in the story he writes or simply in his head. But I realized: it doesn’t matter where most of these events occur in the loop of musicals we see. The “realness” of the events don’t matter. That’s not what composer-lyricist-librettist Michael R. Jackson seems to be conveying. In A Strange Loop, a story about identity and self-doubt, what matters is the way Usher internalizes his negative experiences and allows them to fester and infect his outlook, his confidence, and his sense of self.
A Strange Loop is the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical debut of multi-hyphenate Michael R. Jackson. (Pulitzer fun facts: A Strange Loop is the tenth musical to win a Pulitzer. The year La Cage came out was a year another musical won the prize — Sunday in the Park with George. A Strange Loop was the first musical to win the Pulitzer before reaching Broadway; Sunday is one of two musicals to win the Pulitzer but lose the Tony for Best Musical, the other being Next to Normal.) Jackson has described A Strange Loop as emerging from monologues he wrote in his 20s dealing with the frustrations of religion, sexuality, career growth, and sharing a name with a famous person.
On the other hand, La Cage aux Folles was written by composer lyricist Jerry Herman, of Hello, Dolly! fame, and librettist Harvey Fierstein, then known for his play Torch Song Trilogy, and now known for librettos of such musicals as Newsies and Kinky Boots. La Cage was originally directed by theater legend Arthur Laurents, who might best be known for writing the librettos for West Side Story and Gypsy, but he had an illustrious career as a director as well. These three men represented three generations of gays, and this was significant in their melding of this musical. Harvey Fierstein was in his 20s when he wrote La Cage. He set out to break down barriers and provoke outrage. He wanted a bold, controversial musical about gay life. Laurents tempered Fierstein’s expectations; Laurents’ goal, as he explains in his book On Directing, was not to please the queer and ally audiences, who were already on his team’s side, but rather to convert some of the opposition. The people represented in the musical by Dindon were the very people Laurents wanted to sway.
What a challenge for a theater-maker. How do you convince someone that the character made in their image is the bad guy? How do you get them to want to reconsider their beliefs based on this demonstration? Considering La Cage’s original run had over 1700 performances, it’s evident that Laurents and co. succeeded. By contrast, A Strange Loop ran just shy of 300 performances and did not recoup its investment. The audience for La Cage was the “enemy,” the inspiration for the villain of the show. As such, the villain is underdeveloped, while the protagonists shine. We get to see Georges and Albin’s relationship, their worries, and their dreams. They make their case for the bigoted audience that they deserve happiness. From some of Herman’s most romantic ballads to the gut-wrenching act one closer “I Am What I Am” (which has since become an anthem for the queer community), La Cage reminds its audience that its protagonists lead real and meaningful lives — even if they’re gay.
Who was the audience for A Strange Loop? Certainly the theater critics; it received rave reviews, and everyone from RuPaul to Alan Cumming joined its team of producers. But despite the accolades, the musical struggled to find its footing with audiences. Was the musical too dark? Too boundary-pushing? Was it that it lacked the joie de vivre of La Cage? Where La Cage celebrates life and love, A Strange Loop contemplates its worth. It simply doesn’t seem as digestible a show.
I can’t imagine not digesting A Strange Loop. I saw it three times when it came to California in 2024, including front row seats in San Francisco. No musical has haunted me, made me think, or made me feel seen the way A Strange Loop has. I spent weeks after each theater trip turning the show back over in my head. I told every single person I encountered to go see the show, and I wrote a paragraphs-long review on Facebook and Instagram each time I saw it. I took something new out of the show each time. The first two times I saw it, I was really moved by how relatable the main character’s quest was to understand and be bold in his identity despite pushback from so many different angles. The third show made me think more about how, despite being relatable to people who are not both queer and black (and even those who are neither), how it really is at its core inseparably black and queer. Lines stood out to me last night that highlighted the pressure that queer people face specifically in black communities. It reminded me of the discourse around autism, how it is seen as a “white boy’s disorder” because of cultural expectations — I’ve read many experiences of black autistic people being disregarded because they “don’t have the ‘privilege’ of having a mental disorder.” In A Strange Loop, while many of the pressures (particularly religious ones) are not necessarily race-specific, it is fascinating to see how the character being black contributes to the pressures for him not to be gay.
One other show has made me feel seen the way A Strange Loop did: La Cage aux Folles. I saw La Cage twice in 2024 as well (I like repeat viewings, okay?). The first time I saw it was a month after I came out as trans. No performance has ever reached me the way that little community theater’s Albin did. I watched Albin, this dramatic drag queen who almost seemed to identify as a trans woman — as much as one could in 1984 terminology — demand respect and attention, all the while being betrayed by his own family, who he deeply loves. His own son tosses him aside for not meeting society’s criteria of “normal” — or his own criteria, somehow, despite having been raised by the man. The whole first act follows Georges as he tries to find a way to inform Albin of this betrayal. From the dread of knowing this reveal, to actually watching the family reject Albin, to Albin breaking down and standing up, crying “I Am What I Am” — I was sobbing at intermission. I have never cried at a musical (or movie, or book…) before. It was a weird experience. But La Cage was just so moving.
La Cage aux Folles and A Strange Loop bookend queer musical theater history (as of now…) and they couldn’t be more different, save for one element: they both demonstrate the queer experience in a meaningful, relatable way. They take very different approaches to the topic of queer identities, and as such, they are both groundbreaking musicals for the times they were written in. These two musicals are pillars in queer musical theater, and I couldn’t recommend either enough. Go see these shows if they are ever performed near you.
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