Word: fierstein
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...opening night. Worse, for the main stem's economic and emotional health, there have been no successful romantic comedies in more than a year. It says something dour about Broadway, its playwrights and its audience that the last laugh-till-you-cry hit was Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey Fierstein's savvy sudser about a not-so-gay drag queen. You may begin to wonder if there are any heterosexuals out there who both feel deeply and write funny...
...Jerry Herman's old-fashioned but tuneful score is a radical subject. La Cage aux Folles is a love story with a difference: it celebrates the romance of two middle-aged homosexual men, one of whom is a transvestite. Last year's Torch Song Trilogy, by Harvey Fierstein, was the first gay play to make it on Broadway, and La Cage, for which Fierstein wrote the book, seems almost certain to become the first successful gay musical. Broadway is out of the closet and has slammed the door behind...
Though the musical is inferior in some ways to the movie-its plot line is less plausible, for one thing-Fierstein has improved it in other ways, making the two leads more human, more substantial and, finally, more interesting than they were in either the film or the play. "We're showing that marriage, commitment, family, don't have to belong to heterosexuals," he says. "We decided early on that our greatest enemy would be the tendency to hide, to avoid being honest. If a gay show is a hit and doesn't make a statement, what...
...level of its best performances or its best moments. Herman's music is better-than-average Broadway fare, hummable and with a simple, insistent beat. But his lyrics are often trite and vulgar. "Look under our glitz, muscles and tits," he writes in one song. Fierstein's book is sometimes forced; the campy scenes with the black maid/butler (William Thomas Jr.) quickly become tedious, for example Arthur Laurents' direction is occasionally jarringly awry, as when he has the mother of Jean-Michel's fiancee do a degrading bump-and-grind in her underwear...
...When there's a market they can tap, they will go after it." Though Torch Song's success has lifted his career into orbit, it has not changed Fierstein's life very much in other ways. He still has an apartment in Brooklyn, where he lives alone with two dogs, still rides the subways and is still trying to curb, without much apparent progress, an overly generous waistline. His former lover, the bisexual schoolteacher, was thrilled to see Fierstein win the Tonys; Fierstein, meanwhile, has become involved with another actor-writer. Right now, however, he is thinking...