Word: torch
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...perhaps merely the year's hot property. Many Hollywood studios are bidding for Torch Song Trilogy, which is a funny, sad, always touching story about homosexuals. Producers in more than half a dozen foreign countries have purchased the rights. Fierstein left the show last week to finish work in Boston on a musical version of La Cage aux Folles, for which he has written the book and which is scheduled to open on Broadway in August. Suddenly he is in demand. One producer even wants him to be the voice of the MX missile in a film comedy, which...
...previous night his friends gave him a party for his 29th birthday (the Moët is a reminder); the evening before that, he pulled off the equivalent of a grand slam at the Tony ceremonies: he won two awards, one for writing the year's best play, Torch Song Trilogy, and a second as best actor, for his starring role in the play. Says he, exultantly: "I feel like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland all rolled into...
That directness has made Torch Song a commercial success when the anticipated failure of other plays with gay themes has sent Broadway producers fleeing. Homosexuals have long been a vital part of the theater, of course-Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Tennessee Williams come immediately to mind-and it can be argued that much of Broadway is infused with a gay sensibility. But never before has an out-of-the-closet play like Torch Song done so well with straight, middle-class audiences. For 3 hours and 40 minutes they enter into the life of Arnold Beckoff, who makes...
After his graduation in 1973, he turned to playwriting. The first part of Torch Song was performed off-off-Broadway in 1978, with the second and third parts following in 1979. But when Fierstein wanted them produced as a trilogy, people he went to would not buy. "Producers said that no one would sit still that long [the play was then well over four hours] and that it was too homosexual," he says. Fierstein himself questioned what he was doing, but finally his straight brother Ronald, 32, put him right. "You've got a vision," he said...
...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...