Broadway Play Review—Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song” Returns

Torch Song
Written by Harvey Fierstein; directed by Moises Kaufman
Performances through February 24, 2019
Helen Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street, New York, NY
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Mercedes Ruehl and Michael Urie in Torch Song (photo: Joan Marcus)

It’s rare to see a Broadway show as bighearted, sentimental, funny and heartbreaking as Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song. At its 1982 premiere, it was a four-hour behemoth titled Torch Song Trilogy, earning raves and two Tony awards for its author/lead actor, who played Arnold Beckoff, the lovably cranky drag performer at its center. Now shortened by an hour and losing a word from its title, it might be even more affecting with some meat trimmed off its bones. 

The probing Torch Song, which dramatizes Arnold’s successful onstage work as Virginia Hamm and his unsuccessful offstage life comprising fraught relationships with his bisexual ex, adopted teenage son and homophobic but protective mom, is set in the pre-AIDS era. Arnold’s lover Alan has been killed in a hate crime, beaten to death outside their apartment, a horrible reminder of the horrors gay men faced while trying to live their lives. Fierstein’s trimmed version and Moises Kaufman’s staging keep Arnold’s disparate relationships—with his mother; with Ed, who left him to marry a woman, but who returns when she throws him out; and with his adopted (and gay) son David—front and center. 

Arnold, who is presented with naked honesty, is annoying without becoming wearying, a difficult tightrope walk which Michael Urie accomplishes with exceptional skill, his deadpan looks after spitting out a lethal line or campy reactions after a dry reading allowing him to make Arnold sympathetic by showing him in his entirety: as performer and lover, father and son, joker and mourner.

The same goes for Mercedes Ruehl in the (admittedly) scene-stealing part of Arnold’s mother. Although Ruehl is an old hand at the killer pause, double take or exasperated retort, her Jewish mother who can’t understand why her son is gay is anything but clichéd. This delectable mother-son rapport has genuine—if occasionally uncomfortable—feeling.

The rest of the cast—Michael Hsu Rosen (Alan), Jack DiFalco (David), Ward Horton (Ed) and Roxanna Hope Radja (Lauren, Ed’s wife)—remains a step behind only because Urie and Ruehl are on such a rarefied plane. But everybody does justice to a humane work of art that has only deepened with age.