I Am What I Am: the Jerry Herman anthem that anyone can own

I Am What I Am, his signature anthem from La Cage aux Folles, is a song to be scaled whenever drink has been taken and identity totters: by a spangled diva in the spotlight, a club kid staking a claim, a bridesmaid clinging desperately to dignity.

Anxious, defiant, you stare into the dazzle, hitch up your tits and sing.

La Cage is a Feydeau farce with show tunes, pitting a cabaret queen against the moral majority, with a book by Harvey Fierstein (who later lent his gravel-pit register to the song on Broadway).

“I want to take those five words, if you will give them to me … I can write you a first-act closer that will be a killer because I feel that emotion in me.” The next morning, he gathered everyone in his 61st Street studio and sang through the mounting choruses.

In London 25 years later, Douglas Hodge’s gurgling Albin made it sound like a nervous breakdown in a glitter ball, while world-weary Roger Allam had more than a touch of Ena Sharples: being yourself is hard work, but what else can you do?

Herman’s showstoppers are relentless: they sink their teeth into you with bulldog grit and drag you along, chorus after chorus.

Meanwhile, in 2012 it capped the opening ceremony for London’s Paralympics – a firework-igniting extravaganza including a hands-in-the-air Ian McKellen, a vast sculpture of artist Alison Lapper and, at its leather-lunged centre, Beverley Knight leading the 80,000-strong crowd in an adapted chorus: “I am some-body, I am what I am.”

Identity politics have become ever less cut and dried since Popeye sang, “I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam – I’m Popeye the sailor man” and since Herman gave voice to an individual’s essential core