Goodspeed audiences know director Rob Ruggiero for his sublime Opera House productions of some of the more serious and deeper works in the music-theater canon — “Show Boat,” “Carousel,” “The Most Happy Fella” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” which he did after making his Goodspeed debut with the more straight-up comedy, “Annie Get Your Gun.”

He’s returned to the East Haddam theater, and this time around, he’s guiding a show that is more broadly funny, lighter and, well, spanglier than any of those previous titles: “La Cage aux Folles.”

“I often do the ‘South Pacifics,’ the ‘Fiddlers,’ I’m doing ‘Oklahoma’ after (‘La Cage’) ... I gravitate toward those strong story shows,” Ruggiero says. “To me, I don’t think of them as dark, as other people do, but with a lot of substance to them. ... It’s great to be able to do some of the work I love to do but to have a lot of fun. It’s just fun. There’s a lot of smiles and jokes.”

That’s not to say there isn’t substance in “La Cage.” Ruggiero points out that there is, along with all the razzle-dazzle and humor.

About the material: “La Cage” — which debuted on Broadway in 1983, with revivals in 2004 and 2010 — was created by songwriter Jerry Herman, best-known for “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame,” and by librettist Harvey Fierstein, whose music-theater credits include “Newsies” and “Kinky Boots.”

The plotline is taken from the 1973 French play of the same name (which also inspired a 1973 movie that was remade as the Robin Williams-Nathan Lane comedy “The Birdcage”). The story goes like this: Georges runs a St. Tropez drag nightclub called La Cage aux Folles. Its star is Albin. In their personal lives, the duo have been in a longtime relationship together and have raised the son that Georges fathered during a brief heterosexual liaison in his younger years. That now-grown son, Jean-Michel, has become engaged to a woman whose father just so happens to lead the “Tradition, Family and Morality Party” — a group that wants to close down drag clubs.

Jean-Michel fibs to his fiancee that Georges is a former diplomat, not a drag-club emcee. And, when his future in-laws visit, Jean-Michel wants the home redecorated in a more sedate manner — and for Albin to stay away.

Ruggiero describes himself as “just a story guy,” and, with any show he does, he starts with the story and the relationships.

“One of the things we’re trying to do with this production of ‘La Cage’ is to, of course, sustain all the fun and outrageousness of it, but not let that dominate the power of the story,” he says. “It’s an unconventional love story of sorts. That touches people. Also, it’s the nontraditional family, which I think is very relevant today because of all the legislation.”

Even so, he says he thinks “La Cage” “was never written with any political intention to it. We have no agenda. I have no agenda to do it, but the audiences are just different today. They’re more accepting than they were (in 1983).”

The “La Cage” creators originally received some criticism for making the show so mainstream, but that was their aim — to forge a mainstream musical. Considering when it debuted, Ruggiero thinks and hopes that there’s less worry about audience members going along on the ride now than there was back then.

If everyone does their jobs well in the Goodspeed production, Ruggiero says, the audience will forget gender and just become engaged in the love story of Georges and Albin.

In casting those roles, Ruggiero took an approach similar to the way he cast Tevye in Goodspeed’s “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“I didn’t want a Borscht Belt, shticky Tevye. I wanted a Tevye with humanity,” he says. “I knew I needed to find a Georges and Albin who would embrace it and had real acting chops.”

His choices: James Lloyd Reynolds as Georges and Jamison Stern as Albin. Reynolds has been at Goodspeed before, in “42nd Street” and “Mame,” and Stern’s credits include Broadway’s “By Jeeves.”

Playing their son is Conor Ryan. One of the aspects of the show that Ruggiero finds very moving is Jean-Michel’s struggle with his embarrassment and his fear — and then his eventual acceptance of Albin as his mother, because that is really who Albin has been for two decades.

“That happens so subtly, so organically — it’s not heavy-handed,” Ruggiero says.

He notes that the original production featured a creative team of three generations of gay men and three points of view. He says Fierstien, who was doing his “Torch Song Trilogy” at the time, “was the more political voice, the voice of human rights, the more brave voice. Jerry loved the movie and just wanted to write another great Broadway musical — more mainstream of sorts. Arthur (Laurents, the director) was the more progressive of them, doing more progressive musical theater, so they balance each other out beautifully, and you can see that in this piece.”

Ruggiero just directed his first Jerry Herman show last year, in the form of “Hello, Dolly!” at The Muny in St. Louis’ Forest Park. There were some naysayers when he agreed to the project, he admits, and some friends tut-tutted that it’s “a style piece.”

“I was stressed out at the beginning of that, but I found out that I could have my cake and eat it too ... because I was surprised how many moving moments there were in ‘Dolly.’ Yet, we never laughed so much in rehearsal. That gave me a confidence in this particular genre and the voice of this particular writer — these writers.”

IF YOU GO

What: "La Cage aux Folles"

Where: Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam

When: Through Sept. 10; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Wed., 7:30 p.m. Thurs., 8 p.m. Fri., 3 and 8 p.m. Sat., and 2 p.m. Sun.; also, 2 p.m. on select Thursdays and 6:30 p.m. on select Sundays

Tickets: Start at $27, prices subject to change based on availability

Contact: (860) 873-8668, goodspeed.org