Even in our age of civil partnerships, with homosexuality acceptable in high places, Jerry Herman's farcical musical comedy from the 1980s wrestles alluringly with a dilemma that could induce shudders of gay anxiety today. How do you face meeting the morally intolerant parents of the girl your son (Neil McDermott's Jean-Michel) wants to marry? For while you are discreetly gay yourself, you bear the burden of an effeminate drag queen of a lover, Douglas Hodge's Albin, who has perfected a song-and-dance act at the night club you own.

Obviously you insist Albin will not show his painted face, lurid wigs or any other embarrassing bits of himself at this difficult encounter. Such a stand, however, reckons without the drag queen scorned, who stages his ingenious revenge by appearing disguised as Jean-Michel's mother.

At least this second-act confrontation, which takes far too long in arriving, goes with a fine, farcical swing as Iain Mitchell's Dindon, from the Tradition, Family and Morality party, clings to his reputation by his finger-nails and thanks to the dress he dons.

Instead of putting a contemporary gloss on Albin, whom book-writer Harvey Fierstein portrays as a temperamental, golden-hearted queen of the semi-stifled sulk, Terry Johnson's old fashioned production, staged amidst the gawdy tackiness of David Farley's set and an eloquent little band on the side-lines, settles for the soft option of derisive burlesque.

Hodge could have updated Albin, emphasising his courageous determination to be himself, making him at once attractive and transvestite-inclined, camp and feminine to his finger tips as he belts out his big numbers on stage.

Instead Douglas settles for flouncing, flaunting grotesqueries: he adopts a throttled metallic and nasal voice, hunched shoulders and a dyspeptic expression redolent not of love lost but petulance found.

In a production that revels in the sentimental romanticism of The Best of Times and that defiant, gay anthem I am what I am, Philip Quast cuts a wooden figure. His Georges beautifully delivers Song on the Sand but betrays scant serious feeling for an equally distant Albin.

It is in the drag queen numbers, with tap dancing and whirling of fans in small-time imitation of Busby Berkeley that the amusing male transvestite dancers, particularly Nicholas Cunningham's long-legged Hanna, make La Cage aux Folles swing.

• Until March 8 (020 7907 7060).