Nobody who saw the original production of Jerry Herman's musical on Broadway could forget its opening. Up went the curtain on a line of human butterflies looking as feminine as feminine in their exotic finery, only for them to sing “We are what we are” in voices that were incongruously tenor or bass.

Why, then, does Terry Johnson's revival introduce its nightclub dancers by transforming them into silhouettes behind a thin pink curtain, and so start by botching the point of a piece that's all about the oddities and inconsistencies of sexual identity?

But after that false start all goes right with a production whose opening has been postponed twice, thanks to the sickness that has afflicted its leading, well, lady. He or she is Douglas Hodge, an actor able to handle what's comical but also what's touching in Albin, alias Zsa Zsa, the ageing chanteuse in the transvestite club that calls itself La Cage Aux Folles. At times I thought he did too much wincing and effeminate wriggling; but maybe that's what the piece needs if it's to prepare us for high comedy or farce.

Farce comes after Act I has almost too painstakingly set up the situation. Philip Quast's wearily laid-back Georges, who is the club's owner and Albin's long-time lover, has a son who wants to marry. But how to handle the inevitable meeting between the homosexuals whom Jean-Michel regards as his true parents and his bride-to-be's father, a ferociously homophobic puritan? The answer is to pass off Albin as the boy's raunchy Uncle Al and then, when that falters, as his mother.

If the result isn't as funny as it might be it's probably the fault of the librettist, Harvey Fierstein. You certainly can't blame Hodge, who offstage resembles a housewife on a McGill postcard, grimacing at her signs of ageing, and onstage looks and sounds magnificent. To see him crunching rather than merely pursing his lips, or painfully contorting himself into a besuited chimp as he tries to pass as hetero, is to marvel at his range. Yet somehow I laughed less than I expected to.

Nevertheless, Johnson has achieved wonders with the Menier Chocolate Factory's small stage, embracing dancers who tap, do the can-can and end up clattering on to the tables at which some spectators sit. Nor does it miss the show's point. As Hodge repeats in one of Herman's fine songs, ringingly defying those who would conceal or suppress him: “I am what I am, I am my own special creation.”

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