‘Shucked’ Actor Kevin Cahoon on Starring in Pasadena’s ‘La Cage aux Folles’ Revival: ‘It’s 2024, and We’re Still Talking About People Shutting Down Drag Clubs’

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When Kevin Cahoon got his Tony and Drama Desk nominations in 2023 as a featured actor in Broadway’s “Shucked,” he played a hayseed character whose sexuality might or might not have been known to everyone in his straight-laced, corn-fed community.

But in “La Cage aux Folles,” now playing at the Pasadena Playhouse, taking on the lead role of the drag performer Albin, he quite defiantly is who he is — at least until the farcical second act has him comically pretending to be a straight man, then a straight woman, in an attempted act of familial love.

High jinx ensue, as they say… but so do pathos and anger, when Cahoon gets to deliver the gay anthem “I Am What I Am.” In a wide-ranging career that has hardly been limited to these roles, Cahoon has acted in drag on stage (and on TV) a few times before, with his turns in Broadway or off-Broadway productions of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “The Rocky Horror Show” and “The Wedding Singer” as well as television’s “Glow.” But he’s never before stepped into a lead role with quite as much historic weight for the LGBTQ+ community as “La Cage,” the Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein-written show that was the first musical to focus on gay lead characters when it opened in 1983.

The Pasadena production is notable as one of the few times a major revival has been put up with two well-known gay actors being cast, as Cahoon shares the raucous show’s more tenderly romantic scenes with Cheyenne Jackson.