Review: Lainahöyhenissä

Memorable Lesson in Tolerance

Since its Broadway premiere in 1983, La Cage aux Folles has established itself as one of the most popular contemporary musicals, and rightly so. Rarely has such an urgent and touching story been endowed with such a timeless-sounding and dramatically well-adapted tone, and rarely have we here had such a need for intelligent entertainment of this kind.
When the City Theatre now stages it for the first time in Finnish in Helsinki under the title Lainahöyhenissa, it has chosen to do so on the Arena stage, and the reason is obvious. On the main stage rolls Katri Helena, who will break the all-time attendance record.

However, quantity and quality rarely go hand in hand, and the choice of stage turned out to be a successful solution. In the charming old cinema at Hakaniemi Square, you can get close to the audience in a way that has never been possible at First Line, and it was certainly invigorating to smell the dancers as they swept by.


Laughter and crying

Well, the dancers. Here, all the dancers are of course men. We are at a transvestite club with the best drag show in Saint-Tropez. Master of ceremonies Georges and his “wife” Albin, alias prima prima donna Zaza, have for two decades vouched for the quality of the place, but when his son Jean-Michel decides to marry a girl who, to top it all off, is the daughter of the area’s biggest gay hater of politicians, the is loose.


Neil Hardwick’s direction makes the most of the grateful comedic twists without losing sight of the serious message. Like the main characters, you laugh and cry about everything else and most of all you just feel an incredible sympathy for these wonderful loving, feeling, troublesome and unusually human people.

A comparison with the Swedish Theatre’s production is as natural as, in the end, unnecessary. Both do justice to the play and the main characters, even if the City Theatre’s theatrical realisation is a little more well-oiled.

So especially in the insanely snappy show and dance numbers. The guys are as delicious as can be and also professional to the core. In Mindy Lindblom’s fast-paced choreography, they have certainly got something to bite into, and Antti Mattila’s functional set design, together with Sari Salmela’s festively ostentatious costumes, puts the golden edge on the whole thing.

Durable score

I’ve seen worse Georgesar than Pertti Koivula, who is genuinely touching in his performance, while the show’s big exclamation mark is Santeri Kinnunen’s wonderful Albin/Zaza, which makes you sit and gape with pure amazement and happiness. An impressive performance, to say the least, with a twinkle in exactly the right place in the corner of the eye.


Antti Timonen is a beautiful singing Jean-Michel and Marika Westerling a ditto Anne, while Markku Haussila’s silly maid Jacob and Eero Saarinen’s Le Pen clone Dindon are hilarious, albeit from completely different premises. Risto Kupiainen’s arrangement of Jerry Herman’s durable score works like a charm, and Kaisa Kulmala has a keen eye on her eponymous octet.

One can only hope that as many Christian Democrats and True Finns as possible will stray into this memorable lesson in tolerance, and it will probably not hurt one or two representatives of other political parties as well as the church. Perhaps even the very essence of the Christian message of love could be revealed.