This frantic farce, based on a play by Jean Poiret and remade as The Birdcage (1996) and a long-running musical, is the ne plus ultra of camp, and a clear inspiration on later drag comedies. La Cage aux Folles (1978) Une comédie très gay smirked the tagline for this box-office smash.
Cabaret is one of the great accomplishments in musical-theater history, and half a century after its premiere it still has the power to shake us to the bones. La Cage aux Folles (1978) Director: Édouard Molinaro. But not every depiction of LGBT people needs to make us feel good about ourselves. Even in its newest form, Cabaret is hardly a Gay Pride show (despite the title song’s paean to a hard-partying Chelsea queen) its queer elements largely function as decadence, irony or obstacle.
After Bob Fosse made the central character bisexual in his superb 1972 film version, however, revivals of the show rewrote him as nonstraight-and the transformative 1998 Broadway production, which returned to Broadway in 2014, upped the ante by making the malign Emcee of the seedy Kit Kat Klub explicitly queer as well. The original 1966 version of this portrait of German life in the early 1930s-with a book by Joe Masteroff and a classic score by John Kander and Fred Ebb-scrubbed the gayness from its source material, Christopher Isherwood's 1939 novella Goodbye to Berlin. Cabaret ’s unusual evolution gives it a special place on this list, as its relationship to gay content has been in a continual state of flux.
