"La Cage" - Final Weekend

Left: Tim Stewart as "Angelique."

I am what I am
I am my own special creation...
So, come take a look
Give me the hook
Or the ovation.
It's my world
That I want to have a little pride in
My world
And it's not a place I have to hide in
Life's not worth a damn
Till you can say "Hey, world
I am what I am!

I will miss this show a lot! A lot! More than most shows, it required a lot of advance preparation on the part of the cast (in particular, by the Cagelles) but the experience was richer as a result of the extra hard work.

The experience of dressing in drag proved to be oddly liberating, even exhilarating. Who would have known? If it wasn't so much work, I'd consider doing it all the time. Liberation is sometimes a hackneyed word, but there are times when it fits.

In the early Nineties, when I rode a bicycle, I thought everyone in the world should ride a bicycle. Today, I think everyone should wear women's clothes.

What made the experience work, oddly enough, was the shoes. The character shoes we used, with their low heels and sturdy construction, proved to be exceptionally good for the neophyte cross-dresser. For me, heels was the scariest part, but these shoes erased that fear.

The camaraderie in the dressing room was truly exceptional.

Good friends came to see the show on the final weekend.

On Friday, Pam Kay Lourentzos and Charlotte Hartshorne came to see the show.

Whyt Hartman also came to see the show. I hadn't seen her in nearly three years. We did InterACT's "Ola Na Iwi" together at the Old Eagle Theater in 2004, and I thought that she was among the most remarkable teenagers I had ever met. Without artifice or pretense, she had expanded a childhood love of Tim Burton films and J.K. Rowling books to include Celtic lore and the Goth subculture. She is planning to attend school in Wales (closer to the source of it all). It was great to see her again!

On Saturday, Joe The Plumber came and saw the show. His surprised laughter, and Andrew's family's laughter, during the show-opening "I Am What I Am," was so contagious I very nearly broke character. I believe John and Keith saw the show a second time on Saturday.

Sunday's show was a blur. Jon and Eileen Beaver came to see the show. Then there was strike, pizza, and the inevitable parting of the ways of the cast....

Left: Just prior to the John Wayne walk....

"Now, drop your shoulders, and let them grow round and beaten. Stop holding in your stomach. Let it pour over your lap, a testimonial to the nights spent drinking with the boys."

Left to right, Mme. Renaud (Jan Isaacson), Mssr. Renaud (Marc Valdez), Albin (Ryan Adame), and Georges (Martin Lehman). Photo by Steve Isaacson.







On Saturday night, however, a very odd thing happened, the sort of thing we all dread in theater - a sporadic, capricious accident.

At the beginning of the "Masculinity" scene in Act II, Albin (Ryan Adame) arose from a sitting position to imitate John Wayne's signature walk. Unfortunately, while Ryan had been sitting on the chair, one of the curlicues on the white metal chair had insinuated itself deep into a space in the bottom lining of his white jacket. When Ryan arose, the chair clung to his back.

I was standing right behind him, so I lifted the chair in an effort to free him, but the curlicue was deeply embedded. If we weren't careful, Ryan's struggle to free himself would result in a ripped lining, and that would just not do for Albin. What we needed was about ten seconds, to stop the show, and carefully remove the curlicue from the jacket. But since it was a musical, we didn't have that time. And instead of calming down, Ryan seemed to be thrashing around more, and yet more. What the hell was Ryan doing?

Left: Morlochs!





Just at that moment, fighting in the blur of white on Ryan's back, I flashed to that penultimate scene from 1960's "The Time Machine," when George (Rod Taylor), having sabotaged the far-future industrial underworld of one of humanity's descendants, the cannibalistic albino Morlochs, attempts to rescue his Eloi girlfriend Weena and escape to the comfort and safety of the year 1966. A big white hairy Morloch jumped on George's back, and he barely escaped.

Similarly, Ryan barely made his escape from the big white hairy monster on his back. Through creative thrashing, he managed to take the jacket off without ripping the lining, and continued with the John Wayne walk. The seconds of time he purchased allowed us to remove the curlicue from the lining. After the walk, he put his jacket back on, and everything was back to normal.

It's scary in live theater, how the most frightening dilemmas can blow up even at the most mundane moments! But that chair has a past. Jan recalls how she got snared by that chair during a scene change in DMTC's most-recent "Evita" and barely got off stage before the lights came up. (I wonder if the Morlochs devised that chair in their industrial underworld?)