By Kenneth Jones
29 May 2010

Playbill.com: Do the serious roles you've played inform your work in La Cage?
DH: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Funnily enough, I find the structure of musicals — I mean, I've only done two musicals — but the structure of musicals, I've always found to be incredibly close to the Shakespeare work that I've done. I mean, people have always said they have a problem with why someone suddenly bursts into song, and I've never had a problem, say, playing Hamlet, with suddenly turning to the audience and saying, "What a rogue and peasant slave am I" or "To be or not to be." You know, these are moments, these great soliloquies, that have a great sort of structure to them, but they're almost internal and the emotions are almost more heightened. You start off as one thing and you end the soliloquy having reached a decision about something or about yourself. I find that incredibly true about the songs — it just seems like a seamless thing to me to be in a scene and then say, "Okay, let's sing about this and let's try and get to the bottom of this problem." And certainly when you do something like Titus Andronicus — although Titus Andronicus butchers about 20 people in the play [Laughs], there's an extraordinary amount of clowning in that, I think. A kind of terrible, Grand Guignol, dark, dark comedy at the end, once he's chopped his own arm off and he murders his daughter and he's murdering all and sundry around him. But, you know, he also has these great arias — and when we did it at the Globe, you're outdoors and it's pouring with rain, you suddenly have to turn and appeal to people, and I think singing the songs, like singing "I Am What I Am," is no different to that, really. It's the same process that you go through, you know.

Playbill.com: This new production is set in the late 1970s. Has that informed your work?
DH: Yeah, in some ways it has helped me in that there isn't the sort of politics of the whole AIDS period, without talking too simplistically about it. But you know, in some ways, I see it as a sort of golden age of homosexuality, when things were much more covert, but it was exciting and thrilling. I find that very interesting…that there's something celebratory and also secret about it, and all those things give it great energy, I suppose.

Playbill.com: How do you and director Terry Johnson work in the rehearsal room? There must be a lot of experimenting. Are you coming up with the ideas for Zaza's performance sequences? Is he?
DH: Yeah, that's all me, really. Well, I've worked with Terry a lot. I mean, one of Terry's great gifts with me is just to let me play, so I would come up with maybe 20 different things, you know. I mean, my route would be to just keep offering up more and more ideas and then he would, I suppose, begin to say, "Listen, this works, that doesn't work. This works, that doesn't work." I think the Piaf idea, to be honest — during performance, that emerged, long after the rehearsals. I just one night decided, because I was singing in French, I did it as Piaf, and I suddenly felt inspiration. [Spoiler alert here!] The "Marilyn" moment with the fan, I came up with in this rehearsal. We'd never done that in England. I mean, in fact what we had — we didn't have a Marilyn costume. That's completely new for New York. And the white, pleated dress is completely new for New York. To be honest, all the costumes are new for New York, more or less, apart from the "I Am What I Am" costume. You know, a lot of that is just play, really, and I suppose I have a history of doing impersonations … although I've never impersonated women before. [Laughs] What Terry's great at is he lets me follow any track as far as I need to follow it, even if it's completely stupid at the end of it.

Playbill.com: This is your Broadway debut. Are you loving New York?
DH: Yeah, I am. I haven't really seen much of it. I tend to be just kind of doing eight shows a week and then hobbling around outside of that, feeling sorry for myself, because I find it totally and utterly all-consuming, the whole job — the role, really. So there's also a limit to how long you can keep going — I mean, wearing high heels for six hours on a matinee day, it all begins to take over in the end. But I love New York. I always have loved New York, and to be here doing this is a dream come true.

Playbill.com: What do you do to protect your body and voice for such a strenuous role? Vitamins?
DH: I am having two massages a week. I'm having every kind of vitamin known to man. I'm having B-12 shots. [Laughs] Yeah, I'm taking care of myself.

Playbill.com: Will you stay in La Cage beyond six months?
DH: I'm pretty keen to stay, and I think that's probably what's gonna happen, as long as I can solve, yeah, family things. But I think, probably, I'll do a year. Probably, they won't do the deal on that, I shouldn't think, for the next couple of weeks, but certainly they've asked me to, and I would love to.

(Kenneth Jones is managing editor of Playbill.com. Write him at kjones@playbill.com.)