un homme et un homme; As a splashy new La Cage aux Folles hits Broadway, Adam Green talks to the A-team who are pulling out all the stops.

If Jerry Falwell or Rush Limbaugh is on your annual Christmas list, you might want to think twice before getting either of them two on the aisle for this month's big-ticket revival of La Cage aux Folles, Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein's glitzy, schmaltzy, and decidedly fabulous musical comedy about drag queens and family values on the French Riviera.

Based on Parisian playwright Jean Poiret's 1973 farce (which also spawned a hit movie and a Mike Nichols remake), La Cage aux Folles won the 1984 Tony for Best Musical. Its central figures are Georges, the put-upon owner of a transvestite cabaret in St.-Tropez, and Albin, his semi-hysterical longtime companion, who, as Zaza, is also the club's biggest star. Trouble enters paradise when their son, Jean-Michel (the product of Georges's lone heterosexual indiscretion), announces that he is getting married. His intended, it turns out, is a girl and, worse, the daughter of an official from the "Tradition, Family and Morality Party," who is arriving that evening to meet his future in-laws. Jean-Michel bans the flamboyant Albin from the family gathering, but the heartbroken diva can't stay away and, needless to say, complications ensue.

La Cage's fusion of old-fashioned showbiz sentiment and post-Stonewall candor is reflected in the show's creators. As a young man in the fifties, Herman played piano in Upper East Side cocktail lounges and wrote a musical about Israel called Milk and Honey; as an overweight teenager in the seventies, Fierstein performed in drag in East Village nightclubs and portrayed an asthmatic, lesbian maid in Andy Warhol's experimental play Pork. Yet somehow, the partnership between the Hello, Dolly! and Mame composer and the fiercely impassioned author of Torch Song Trilogy worked.

Fierstein's sharp-tongued and moving book for La Cage is more conventional than one would expect from an angry young activist. And Herman's score, while rooted in the Broadway idiom of his earlier hits, explores more nuanced emotions. "The Best of Times" (which, Herman says, "you can't go to a bar mitzvah without hearing") celebrates living for the moment in the face of uncertainty. It's a song that gained particular poignance for Herman, who found out during the run that he was HIV-positive. "I really thought that La Cage was my last gasp," he says. "I certainly didn't expect to be around-and healthy-for the revival 20 years later. It's pretty delicious." But the show's most famous number is the act-one barn-burner "I Am What I Am," which became a Broadway standard, a gay-pride anthem, and a disco hit by Gloria Gaynor. Herman says, "It was like hearing the big numbers from Dolly and Mame wrapped together and belted out by this indomitable man in a ...