Once again it is time to be someone, who’s anyone other than me….

Just as you get a deeper pleasure each time you return to a favourite restaurant (and maybe even eat the same dish), so I find that my enjoyment of particular shows knows no bounds. Each time I go back I find new pleasures and enjoy previous ones again, too. And theatre, being a living organism, nothing is ever the same twice in any case… or even the same for the twentieth time.

And La Cage always speaks to me with a particular resonance. Not just in its defiant cry for standing up for being who you are - just the thing I began by saying, of course, that I go to the theatre to avoid! - but also for its portrait of a different construction of a family unit having equal validity to any other. I interviewed John Barrowman, who takes over in La Cage from tonight, in yesterday’s Sunday Express, and he spoke openly about his own long-term relationship with Scott Gill, an architect, and then told me: “I want to claim the family values term back for us — our family values are just as relevant and just as strong as someone else’s, except ours are slightly different, but if you really look at it, they’re not that far off.”

John and Scott have been together for some sixteen-and-a-half years, and as he put it me, “Albin and Georges have been together for twenty years, so I can relate to an awful lot of it. It’s a show about hitting a bump and moving on from it, and it happens to us all.” I also asked him what the secret of their longevity is, and he replied, “If I had a formula for it, I’d bottle it and sell it and I’d be really, really rich - Andrew Lloyd Webber rich! What you have to remember is that we’re two men, with very individual personalities. You have to let those personalities live - you can’t ask the other person to put it away. And if there’s a hump or bump in the road you’re travelling down, it is worth giving up everything you’ve worked and believed in for so long? We all make mistakes - if you get a little pissed one night and give someone a snog, it’s not the end of the world. It’s silly, but it’s not going to destroy who I go home to at night, or the actual person I am in love with.”

In the current issue of the ATG magazine, I also interviewed Philip Quast and Roger Allam, who have both also been with their respective partners for a long time. Quast has been with his wife Carol for over 30 years, and they have three teenage children; Roger has been with his partner for 16 years, and they have two kids, aged 9 and 4. But as Allam quickly pointed out to me, “I bumped into Simon Callow the other day, and he remembered seeing the original production on Broadway and told me that everyone who played leading roles in it had said in the programme that they would like to dedicate their performance to their wife and children. So we’re not saying that!”

But the matter of relationships is also key to the show’s universality and the chord it strikes with audiences. As Philip pointed out, “It’s about a relationship that goes through ups and downs. They’ve been through a lot, they’ve neglected each other a bit through work and the club they run, and they find each other again by losing their son when he tells them he is going to get married, but they gain a daughter-in-law. In the end, they’re alone again together, having rediscovered each other. It’s got a very deep core, I think.”

It may be surprising to find that within a farcical musical, but even more surprising to find those depths explored so fully in performances like the ones that I saw Philip and Roger give on Saturday. I had previously been to their press night soon after they took over, and it was already clear that they were having a ball and had established a ready rapport, based on their long-term offstage friendship (and occasional rivalry, as when Quast inherited the role of Javert that Allam had originated in Les Miserables, but Quast was asked to perform for the 10th anniversary concert at the Royal Albert Hall).

But by Saturday night, they looked and felt like a couple who had been together for years. And indeed, the run was not without its own ups-and-downs: Philip tore a cartiledge in his knee, and had to have an operation a few weeks into the run. But fortunately he recovered and returned to the show, and I was thrilled to see him do it again. Likewise Allam, whose first major musical role this was in some sixteen years (since he appeared in the lead role of the West End production of City of Angels in 1993, whose author Larry Gelbart coincidentally died last Friday); these were two performers at the top of their considerable game, and another in the rich glories that the London stage throws up so often that such great performances are being given in a show so late into its run.