“I had never seen La Cage , though Harvey and I have been friends for 20 years,” he says. “I went ba

WALK ON THE SANDS | Broadway star Christopher Sieber, right, teams with George Hamilton for the tour of 'La Cage aux Folles,' in which Sieber plays a different role than the one he played opposite Harvey Fierstein.
Christopher Sieber is something of a rarity these days: Like Michael Cerveris and Raul Esparza, he's an actor who makes his living on the Broadway stage. You might even call him a gay Sutton Foster. Certainly he doesn't mind.
The analogy is fully warranted. Despite stints as a regular on two short-lived sitcoms — Two of a Kind with the Olsen Twins and the gay domestic comedy It's All Relative ("It was a good show, we just got killed by American Idol ," he says) — Sieber's bread-and-butter has been the stage. From Beauty and the Beast's Gaston to the sexy Wolf in Sondheim's Into the Woods to a gay Sir Galahad in Spamalot (the first of two Tony Award nominations), he's a marquee name who makes musical theater his own.
Sieber had wrapped his Tony-nominated role as dwarfish Lord Farquaad in Shrek: The Musical ("I joke it was the first time I ever had to be on my knees after I got a job," Sieber jokes) and was about to enter Chicago again as Billy Flynn. While he was standing in line about to see a Broadway show, someone tapped him on the shoulder. "You're going to see La Cage," they told him.
"I had never seen La Cage , though Harvey and I have been friends for 20 years," he says. "I went backstage to see Harvey and offer my congratulations [after the performance]. Then Harvey" — and here, Sieber affects the best Fierstein impersonation you've ever heard — "says, ' Close the door… So, are you gonna do the show?? '"
"I had no idea I would ever play that part," he says. "I don't know why they thought of me. But I got to see [Harvey] do Albin, and when you write it and you perform it, you know this is what he meant." Legendarily tan George Hamilton took over Georges. That alone has been a surreal experience.
"It was really tough at first — it still is — to see Georges from the position slipknot tour date times of Albin," he says. "I worked with Harvey on that role … and now I know everything about Albin! I adore [Hamilton] — who wouldn't? He's so goddamned charming — but playing opposite yourself is like watching someone driving your new Cadillac down a gravel road. You keep wanting to yell 'Slow down! Be careful!'"
"I don't know about you, but I don't wanna be a political football anymore," he says. "Those yahoos keep spouting off about gay marriage. Santorum and all that weird stuff he keeps saying? Why is he so obsessed with gay sex? One doth protest too much I think. I am a human, I am a man same as you and for you to call me evil? You can go fuck yourself. I am married now to my husband and we just want to love each other and spend our lives together. We've been together a long time,but once you have found him, never let him go."