GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Logan Keslar of 'La Cage Aux Folles'

When the Broadway transfer from London of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of La Cage Aux Folles was announced last year, some people wondered if it was too soon, since La Cage had been revived on Broadway only five years ago. Logan Keslar had waited long enough, though. La Cage is a show he feels he was meant to do, but he just missed the last revival—he moved to New York a few weeks after it closed in mid-2005. He subsequently did two regional productions of La Cage. So when the current revival opened at the Longacre Theatre this April, Keslar was back in the Cagelles line for the third time in thirteen months.

As reconceived by Menier director Terry Johnson, that chorus line of drag queens is much shorter than usual: The Cagelles have been trimmed from the original staging’s twelve to six. “I feel really fortunate that this is my first Broadway show,” says Keslar, who plays the Cagelle named Bitelle. “I really like being one of six working hard together and complementing each other well...you don’t get lost in the crowd.”

Keslar’s two previous productions of La Cage—which both used the original staging—were at the Riverside Theatre in Vero Beach, Fla., in early 2009 (where he played Mercedes) and the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, also on Florida’s east coast, last January (he was Phaedra; Mark Jacoby starred as Georges). The Maltz show was in tech when the final round of auditions for the Broadway La Cage took place, but Keslar skipped out on those vital rehearsals to fly to New York for the callbacks. “I just had to make it happen,” he says, “because it felt so right.”

Keslar didn’t feel fated for La Cage because he was used to traipsing around in heels and a dress; he describes his prior drag experience as mere dabbling (e.g., on Halloween). But there were those red shoes he was always swiping from his sister growing up—until his parents just bought him his own pair. And as a dancer, he explains, “I kind of naturally have more of a woman’s facility in some ways. I’m really limber and turned-out. I remember in ballet class, whenever the boys would have to do certain things and the girls would have to do certain things, it was so much easier for me to do some of the girls’ things. I was always having to not kick as high, because a lot of time that’s not what a guy does.”

One other harbinger of his Cagelle destiny: As an adolescent, he saw Lee Roy Reams perform “I Am What I Am” at the annual fundraising gala for Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS) and thought, “I can’t believe this is his day job: He gets paid to sing with a boa. I want that job.”

Before Keslar began his La Cage threepeat, he’d done another musical multiple times: West Side Story. “Kind of an interesting mix,” he says in deliberate understatement about the two roles he’s had repeatedly, gang member and drag queen. Keslar was in a 2007 West Side Story produced by Atlanta’s Theater of the Stars that played the Fox in Atlanta, Kansas City Starlight Theatre and Wolf Trap in northern Virginia. The following year, he performed in the 50th anniversary production on London’s West End, followed by the Germany and Greece leg of its tour. 

“I’m glad that I had the chance to develop as a male dancer and really strengthen myself that at this point I can do anything,” says Keslar, who’s always played Big Deal in West Side Story. “It’s so much fun for me after having spent so much time doing West Side Story to express myself in a completely different way now.” And, he adds, there are similarities between the Jets and the Cagelles: “I sometimes feel the same sensation right before we have to do the cancan as I would right before ‘Cool’—like, how am I going to get through this today? It’s like a marathon.”

Keslar first did West Side Story in the fall of 2006 at TUTS, the Houston regional where his career was launched as a child. He was born and raised in Liberty, Texas (pop. 8,000), and at age 10 started going into Houston—about 75 minutes southwest—for training. He attended the TUTS-affiliated Humphreys School of Musical Theatre and appeared in his first show at the theater when he was 10, playing a bellboy in Grand Hotel (Liliane Montevecchi re-created her Tony-nominated portrayal of Elizaveta Grushinskaya in that production). Introduced to dance at age 5 when he enrolled in gymnastics with his sister, Keslar also trained in Florida at Ann Reinking’s Broadway Theatre Project. His later appearances on the TUTS stage include Damn Yankees, starring Tony Randall, and an original musical adaptation of Scrooge, with Gary Beach in the title role. He also performed in shows at such smaller Houston theaters as Main Street and Masquerade. “It was really beneficial for me,” Keslar says of his childhood career, “because I was exposed to Equity theater and Equity rules. From a young age I learned professionalism and what it meant to really be a working performer.”

Furthermore, he says, “I feel lucky I had parents who were willing to sacrifice so much so I could be a part of this. Looking back, it’s crazy how much driving they would do.” His mother, Sandy, has been rewarded for her dedication: She’s now a member of IATSE and works at TUTS, as well as Houston Ballet and Houston Grand Opera, as a dresser. She was offered her first dresser job (after Logan had left Texas) by people who knew her from accompanying him to all his rehearsals and performances and making his costumes.

Keslar attended high school in Houston, winning an out-of-district scholarship to the magnet High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Before he could get his driver’s license and commute on his own to high school from Liberty, he often stayed with friends in Houston during the week. “It was kind of like boarding school, I was away from my family so much,” he says.

He came to New York for the first time when he was 16, and had a transformative experience at one of the Broadway shows he attended: Thoroughly Modern Millie, which he saw soon after Sutton Foster won the Tony for it. “I definitively remember seeing her do that, and everyone standing up at the end of ‘Gimme Gimme’ and giving her a standing ovation,” he says. “I always knew that’s what I wanted to do, but that was one of the first moments where I saw a performance that changed my life.”

On the day of Keslar’s H.S. graduation in 2005, he received a call from director Michael Tapley (who’d directed him at TUTS and was his dance teacher), offering him a role in Footloose that summer at Kansas City Starlight. The show earned him his Equity card, and he moved to New York right after the run wrapped. Keslar had been accepted to a few colleges but didn’t really see the point in matriculating. “I didn’t want to go to school,” he admits. After attending high school away from his hometown, “I felt like I’d already had a college-like experience,” he says, “and I felt like I knew what I was getting into working-wise.”

During his senior year in high school, Keslar had played Mark in TUTS’ A Chorus Line, choreographed and directed by Baayork Lee from the original Broadway cast. “That was always my favorite show growing up,” he says. “I think I probably ruined seven VHS tapes of that movie—even though now, obviously, I know it’s a joke.” He’d auditioned for Chorus Line on his 18th birthday, and was thrilled to be cast alongside Shannon Lewis, whom he’d listened to ad infinitum on the Fosse album. “She was, like, everything to me,” Keslar says, “one of my childhood idols.”

It was in that 2004 production of Chorus Line that Keslar met Alexander Quiroga, who played Al. They’ve been roommates ever since Keslar moved to NYC. Quiroga’s currently in Wicked, and he and Keslar have performed together in Broadway Bares. Another memory Keslar has from A Chorus Line: His mother attended every single performance in the three-week run—just as she attended every performance of La Cage the week it opened on Broadway.

In his five years in NYC prior to his Broadway debut, Keslar appeared in Aida and Hot Mikado at the suburban Westchester Broadway Theatre and in On the Town at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse. He also returned to TUTS to be in Cats and Dreamgirls. And he revisited West Side Story in excerpts: He performed at a 2007 event where the Recording Academy—which awards the Grammys—honored the show’s creators (Stephen Sondheim, Chita Rivera and Carol Lawrence were in attendance), and he danced “Cool” at the 2008 Career Transition for Dancers annual gala. He’s been in several editions of Broadway Bares as well, and he was in a number featuring the music of A Chorus Line and Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk in the 2006 “The Public Sings” concert at City Center.

Before landing his current gig, Keslar was getting a bit antsy about making his Broadway debut. Time and again, he’d made it to the final cut at Wicked auditions (“me at the Gershwin with one other boy”) but didn’t get cast. He was also seen repeatedly for the role of Mark in the 2006-08 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line; he can even be spotted in the documentary about the casting of the revival, Every Little Step—for, he says, “3.4 seconds” during the ballet combination.

Keslar went about six months without getting any work after he did La Cage in Florida in 2009. “I actually was happy with that break,” he says, since he was still recovering from the previous year’s exhausting West Side Story tour in Europe and catching up on everything that had been put on hold while he was out of the country. He took a sales job at the Issey Miyake store downtown and spent time mulling over how to deal with the possibility of never getting to Broadway. He’d been in New York four years by then and “hadn’t done what I thought was so important,” he says. “I just wanted to be on Broadway so bad; it was all that was ever on the horizon for me. I started thinking, ‘What if I don’t...?’”

Now, here it is a year later and he’s in a multi-Tony-winning production. “This is the best part of me, dancing and performing,” he says. “It’s the only time when I feel the most like myself, and the most comfortable. So I just have to have faith. I feel really blessed and really content. People always say, ’It looks like you guys are having so much fun up there.’ We really, really are.” In addition to his regular Cagelle role, Keslar’s just begun understudying the role of Jean-Michel, Georges and Albin’s son.

He now sees his pre-Broadway experience as essential to his maturity. “Going from high school to living on my own, I guess in the ‘stairway of life’ I skipped a few steps,” says Keslar. “So I got here and I had to grow up—it was just a very different reality from what I was used to.” Looking back at the repeated missed chances with Wicked, for example, he realizes “you just can’t beat yourself up over it.

“That’s what I’ve learned here,” he continues. “At some point you have to let things go. Like, you know what? Maybe I need a break, because it’s driving me nuts. Maybe I don’t need to go in for a year or two, and then if they see me again, maybe something will have changed.”

Keslar is especially happy that he landed not only a role on Broadway but a role in a production like this La Cage. “They let us be free to ’roam’ a little bit,” he says. “It’s not choreographed so specific, which I have to say has been the hugest gift, to have someone trust me enough to define my character, and to be different. I have several moments where I don’t have to do the exact same thing every night. I’m free to express myself [with] whatever I’m feeling or wherever I’m at that day.”

The Cagelles do have to be careful, however, during the scenes with audience interaction. For an authentic cabaret feel, some audience members are seated at tables near the stage. They’re asked to remove everything from their table when the birdcage is brought on stage for “La Cage Aux Folles,” but the instructions are occasionally ignored or forgotten. Cagelles get onto the tables to dance during the number, and Keslar says it’s not uncommon for them to have to quickly push “three iPhones, four cocktails and a souvenir program” out of their way first. There have also been scattered incidents of Cagelles falling into audience members’ laps after tripping over someone’s feet when they run into the aisles. “Everyone rolls with the punches,” he remarks. “We kind of do live in this nightclub world where things are sometimes not the most pristine. But it works for the world we play in.”

This year has brought Keslar a personal first to go along with his Broadway bow. He became an uncle for the first time on June 24, when his sister, Lesley, gave birth to a baby girl. Just 18 months apart, Logan and Lesley were extremely close growing up. They also have a brother Tyler, who’s three years older than middle child Logan.

Here in New York, Keslar has another family at the Longacre. He shares a dressing room with swing Todd Lattimore; they were also Cagelles together at the Riverside Theatre. The whole La Cage cast, including stars Kelsey Grammer and Douglas Hodge, are tight, Keslar says, and can often be found having a raucous time postshow at Hurley’s, the pub next to the theater. “We tend to get a little loud,” says Keslar. “It’s a bunch of drag queens, what do you expect?”

Photos of Logan, from top: as Bitelle in Broadway’s La Cage Aux Folles; as a different Cagelle, Phaedra, in La Cage at Florida’s Maltz Jupiter Theatre last winter; second from right, dancing with the Jets of West Side Story, with (front, from left) Joey Calveri, Leo Ash Evens and Stuart Capps; in his dressing room at the Longacre, just as he begins his nightly makeup application; in his headshot; with Lyndsay Thomas and Holland Vavra as Dave and the Sweethearts in Dreamgirls in 2007; left, with La Cage headliner Kelsey Grammer and fellow Cagelles Nicholas Cunningham and Sean Patrick Doyle. [Bitelle photo by Joan Marcus]

The Gypsy of the Month column was inspired by the last Broadway revival of La Cage Aux Folles: Our very first Gypsy of the Month was T. Oliver Reid, who played a Cagelle in that production. Reid just won the Metrostar Talent Challenge, a two-month-long, multi-round singing competition at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Room. His prize: an engagement at the Metropolitan Room this winter and a live recording of his show. Visit the cabaret’s website for more information.