In the exemplary Lincoln Center Theater production that ran on Broadway from 2008 to 2010, the director Bartlett Sher found trenchant ways to adjust a story that, as written, is focused almost entirely on the white characters’ anguish. Among other things, he added Black servicemen to the ensemble, segregated from the rest — a historically accurate gesture that wordlessly invoked a bigger picture of prejudice.
The “South Pacific” now playing (through Aug. 11) at Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, Conn., goes even further, casting a Black actor, Cameron Loyal, as Cable. (The Marine Corps did not commission its first Black officer until 1945, but no matter.) In a staging by Chay Yew, a Singapore-born director, everything lands differently without changing a line. The reaction of the white Seabees to the Black officer, no less than his to them, lights up the entire racial structure of the show. Cable’s connection to and abandonment of Liat elevate and enlarge that story.
As the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalog makes plain — see also “The King and I” and “Flower Drum Song” — appropriation was a goal, not a sin, in those postwar years, when finding commonalities among peoples seemed paramount. Even now, I’d argue, appropriation can be a good thing, when done with sensitivity to honor rather than commodify diverse cultural expressions.
But each time I see “La Cage” it seems to succeed at that less. Originally, and perhaps of necessity, it was a carefully crafted brief for toleration. The creative team — songs by Jerry Herman, book by Harvey Fierstein, direction by Arthur Laurents, all gay men — framed that brief, as the gay rights movement did more generally, in the context of family. Georges, the owner of a St. Tropez drag club, lives with Albin, his star drag queen; together they raised Georges’s son, Jean-Michel, who now wants to marry. The problem: His fiancée’s father is an anti-gay politician.
When “La Cage” opened on Broadway, Georges and Albin were played by straight men — Georges by Gene Barry, best known as the TV marshal Bat Masterson. But that sop to expected heterosexual resistance weakened the show’s emotional core. At the final curtain, with the farcical plot resolved and one of those hummable tunes surging in the strings, the couple walked into the sunset with their arms intertwined; that was about the extent of their intimacy. As if in compensation, the drag elements worked overtime to titillate a straight audience, an effect heightened by the fact that two of the 12 so-called Cagelles were played by women.
Read More: For Some Old Musicals, Not Just Revival but Reappropriation
