Comments (0) Best Supporting Actress - 2007

Marcus Davis in La Cage aux Folles

Marcus Davis is not, in fact, an "actress," nor is he even a woman. It doesn't matter. From the moment he stepped to the footlights at the Actor's Playhouse in its production of La Cage aux Folles as "Jacob," a maid/butler done up in lurid soubrette-cum-Mozart drag, he established himself as the most blazingly, supernaturally charismatic female force anybody had seen in a long while. In other productions of La Cage, there has been a tendency for actors playing Jacob to let the script do the work. The lines are so funny, and the character is such an incredible canvas, that you can easily win the hearts and minds of an audience by phoning it in, layering hambone gay stereotype atop hambone gay stereotype until you've got a creature so absurd that it's impossible not to laugh at him/her/it. Davis went a lot farther, making Jacob live and breathe in ways most folks never thought possible, digging not only humor, but affection, intelligence, and yes, even pathos out of a character designed for cheap, easy laughs. And he made it look so easy, so second-nature, that after leaving the show you'd be excused for wondering why no one ever thought to do it that way before.