Oh, the shock and horror of it! The golden rule for West End musicals requires that when true love breaks out, only practising heterosexuals should be involved. Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage aux Folles, which ran for five years on Broadway in the Eighties, ends, however, with the spectacle of its middle-aged French heroes sealing their fraught, long-time relationship with a head-on kiss.

This sentimental, spectacular show combines gay, farcical, transvestite and musical elements, complete with a wonderful chorus of athletic, high-kicking drag queens of no fixed gender and Douglas Hodge’s Albin slipping into flamboyant dresses and becoming a song-bird drag-artist. Yet sex never rears an offensive head. Terry Johnson’s old-fashioned, even reactionary production, which fits far more comfortably into the Playhouse than the little Chocolate Factory, scene of its January opening, reminds us just why La Cage aux Folles still exerts such a strong appeal for traditional, non-gay audiences.

The musical wafts us into a world of appealing comic make-belief, to a drag- queen night club in deepest St Tropez, where nothing and no one is quite what it seems. The silhouetted figures of huge, scantily-attired chorus girls — who turn out to be men — dance as they sing: “We are what we are and what we are is all illusion.”

Denis Lawson’s bland but powerfully sung night-club owner, Georges, is faced with a problem. When his adult son, Jean-Michel, conceived in a never-repeated night of heterosexual passion, wants his father to meet his fiancee’s Right-wing politician father (Iain Mitchell), how can Albin, George’s partner, be kept out of the way? The English, of course, adore drag queens, whether trying to pass themselves off as proper ladies or vainly trying to play masculine-butch. Both these tasks fall to Albin when helping his lover and surrogate-son.

Hodge revels with seductive elan in Albin’s swishing, shimmering drag-act. He evokes Piaf and Dietrich in turn, belting out the musical’s gay anthem, I am what I am, in blazing defiance. He later passes himself off as a proper lady with hilarious precariousness.

But when he tears off wig and dresses to become the real Albin, he turns grotesque. He burlesques the attempts of the ultra feminine, delightfully preposterous Albin to assume a male persona, as if back in the days when sending up queers was what real men did.
Until 10 January (0870 060 6631)