He also did a club act impersonating Ethel Merman singing “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun.” Other roles have included a transvestite in his own Flatbush Tosca (“I sang the whole second act in Italian,” he says), and a 300-year-old woman, Lillian Russell, and 26 other parts in Ronald Tavel’s My Fetus Lived on Amboy Street. Rather than starting his acting career the usual way-as a spear carrier, for instance, in a stock production of Shakespeare-he began professional work as an “asthmatic dyke” in Andy Warhol’s play, Pork. Still, he’s been praised by critics and theatergoers alike, making him just one anomaly of what is already a “wondrous strange” hit for Broadway.Īnother is the 28-year-old playwright-star, Harvey Fierstein. Though a drag queen is often prized for his femininity, drag queen Arnold Beckoff, the main character of Torch Song Trilogy, is less the “little flower” than the Amazon not “pretty” beautiful but “mountain” beautiful as another character says. In honor of the show's anniversary and the recent, Tony-nominated revival starring Michael Urie, Playbill looks back on this in-depth interview with Fierstein-before he was the theatrical icon he is today. While Fierstein had been writing his own work and performing his drag club act around the Village, Trilogy put him on the map. On June 10, 1982, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy opened on Broadway. Sophia: Yeah, open to everyone, day or night.Digging into the archives, we unearth the original articles printed in the Playbills of yesteryear. I like to watch the old guys rearrange themselves when they come out of the water.īlanche (Rue McClanahan): I treat my body like a temple. I’ve played mother to everyone but Attila the Hun.” ĭorothy (Sophia’s daughter, played by Beatrice Arthur): Hi, Ma.

“I’ve played Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Southern mothers, mothers in plays by Neil Simon and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Getty wrote in her autobiography, “If I Knew Then What I Know Now … So What?” (Contemporary Books, 1988). “I’ve played mothers to heroes and mothers to zeroes,” Ms. To me it’s my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80.' The artist did, Getty got the job and won two Emmys'

'I walk fast, I move fast, I talk fast.' She came prepared for the third audition, wearing dowdy clothes and telling the makeup artist, 'To you this is just a job. 'I could understand that,' she told an interviewer a year after the show debuted. 'When she auditioned, Getty was appearing in Hollywood as the carping Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein‘s ‘Torch Song Trilogy.’ In her early 60s, she flunked her Golden Girls test twice because she didn’t look old enough.

Torch song trilogy estelle getty