In 2010, the French director Olivier Py was rehearsing an opera in Amsterdam when another show caught his eye. Playing across the street was a Dutch production of “La Cage aux Folles,” the 1983 Broadway musical about a same-sex couple who work in a drag cabaret. Py immediately got a ticket, and the performance left him “overwhelmed,” he said.
It wasn’t just that the English-language musical version was practically unknown in his native France, though its creators, Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman, had borrowed the story from a well-known French play of the same name. (A 1999 Paris run of the musical ended in bankruptcy, and an attempt in Nice in 2019 played for only two performances.)
More crucially for Py, the central role of Albin — a drag performer who appears onstage as Zaza — hit close to home. Starting around age 20, Py had also appeared in cabaret, alongside his high-profile career directing theater and opera; his alter ego was named Miss Knife. “I felt like a musical was recounting my life,” he said recently.
Now, 15 years later, Py is bringing Albin (and Zaza) home to France. A new production, which he translated and is directing, premieres on Friday at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, where Py has been at the helm since 2023.
He is betting on the country’s readiness to accept a new “Americano-French musical,” he said during a break from stage rehearsals. He was encouraged that such efforts worked with “Les Misérables,” which was unpopular in France until the success last year of a new local version, another Théâtre du Châtelet production.
In the case of “La Cage aux Folles,” the musical is competing with the memory of a cultural phenomenon: the 1978 film adaptation starring Michel Serrault, whom Py described as “a comic genius.” His campy yet vulnerable turn in the role of Albin/Zaza brought newfound visibility to gay people in France, even as the story also drew criticism for its cliché depiction of same-sex couples. (According to Le Monde, one activist “tipped a trash can” over the head of Jean Poiret, the playwright, in a cafe.)
Py, who is 60, was a teenager at the time. The son of a dentist and a shopkeeper, he came out — “though we didn’t use these words at the time” — at 16, which his family “swallowed as best they could,” he said with a laugh.
He remembers seeing “La Cage aux Folles” on television “with a certain ambivalence,” he said. “It was the only representation we had of homosexuality. But it was also the life we didn’t want to have, because it was somewhat painful.”
Still, hidden within the play and the film was “a political bomb,” Py said: the question of same-sex parenting. In “La Cage aux Folles,” Albin and his partner, Georges, have an adult son, Jean-Michel, who throws their life into crisis when he decides to marry into an ultraconservative family. Albin is asked to hide his true self, and refuses: In the musical, which is “much more political” than the play, Py said, the result is “I Am What I Am,” a song that has become an L.G.B.T.Q. anthem.
The character of Edouard Dindon, the conservative politician who is Jean-Michel’s prospective father-in-law, is an especially prescient figure in light of current anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rhetoric in populist politics worldwide, Py said: “The musical is even more contemporary now than it was in the 1980s.”
And its depiction of a committed gay couple remains rare onstage. Damien Bigourdan, the actor and singer who plays Georges, said in an interview at the Châtelet that it was the first time in his 25-year career that he had been offered the role of a gay character. “I was astounded when I first listened to it,” he added. “It’s an incredible gift, and the political message is vital.”
For Py, there was the added challenge of creating a fresh translation for the musical, which took a year and a half. “It’s much harder than translating ‘Hamlet,’” Py said. “I wanted the songs to sound like they had been written in the language.” He remained stuck on “I Am What I Am” for a month, thinking that if he couldn’t match the power it has in English, the production “wasn’t worth doing.”
Language hurdles aside, the cabaret at the heart of “La Cage aux Folles” has special resonance in Paris. It is a throwback to the glory years of a French form of drag: “transformiste” cabarets like Chez Michou and L’Alcazar, where performers often impersonated female singers. Although that has mostly given way to American-style drag, Py’s own decades-long cabaret work was inspired by that era; Miss Knife, his alter ego, is a nostalgic diva described as an “old aunt.”
“To me, being in drag was almost secondary. I just played a character because it was the only way I dared to sing,” Py said. “But putting on heels, false lashes and singing 20 songs is the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. Directing a Wagner opera is child’s play by comparison.”
He regularly decides he is done with drag, he said, only to be lured back: Miss Knife appeared last season at the Théâtre du Châtelet, and lurks in a corner of the playhouse’s website as a “virtual assistant.” (His team convinced him “against his will,” Py joked.)
With productions like “Les Misérables” and “La Cage aux Folles,” Py has put the Théâtre du Châtelet — a space shaken by a lengthy closure for renovation work and the 2020 firing of Ruth Mackenzie as its director over bullying accusations — back on the map as a musical producer. But his appointment at the theater two years ago was controversial.
The search committee had selected two women as the top candidates for the job, only for the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to appoint Py instead. (The city of Paris provides the majority of the theater’s public funding.)
Since then, Py has worked hard to counter the bad press. He erased a deficit of “nearly five million euros,” or $5.8 million, through the sale of a workshop the Châtelet owned outside Paris, cost-cutting measures and the success of “Les Misérables,” which has gone on to tour nationally.
He says he has now found a happy medium at the Châtelet between his twin passions, music and theater. Much of his career was spent at theater institutions: From 2007 to 2013, he ran the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe — whose dynamics he described, with a sonorous laugh, as “hell” — followed by the Avignon Festival, France’s biggest performing arts event, until 2022. “Avignon is purgatory,” he said. “I miss the city, but the pressure was huge.”
By comparison, he said, he is “in paradise” at the Théâtre du Châtelet, a musical theater with a history of programming across genres.
“We love putting people in boxes in France, and all my life I’ve been torn. Here, I can listen to a symphony one night and prepare ‘La Cage aux Folles’ the next day,” he said before heading back to rehearsals. “I feel like I’m in the right place.”
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