Audiences cheering so loudly at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre that they drown out the noise of the traffic on West 45th Street have turned a loud, vulgar, mediocre drag show called Kinky Boots into an unqualified hit. How I wish I could join the applause without reservation, but what has been done to cheapen, coarsen Read More
At 4:40 p.m. last Saturday, after the matinee of Hairspray at the Neil Simon Theatre, Harvey Fierstein was in his dressing room, shedding his role as Edna, the beloved overweight Baltimore mother he plays eight times a week.
He swiveled his chair toward the door. “Oh, there you are,” he purred Read More
And so, back to the ’50s (again), with the consciously modest Broadway musical A Catered Affair.
Modesty doesn’t really suit Broadway; it implies “good taste,” discretion, refinement, art—Stephen Sondheim. The British director of A Catered Affair, John Doyle (of the recent minimalist Broadway revivals of Mr. Sondheim’s Company and Sweeney Todd), has treated what’s Read More
On Monday, April 14, the Transom visited with actor-writer Harvey Fierstein at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where his new play, an adaptation of the 1956 Gore Vidal-penned film A Catered Affair, is scheduled to open later this week.
So far Mr. Fierstein’s dressing room contains about eight pieces of folk art, a second passion Read More
Since my freshman year at Stuyvesant High School in 1975, I’ve been getting my hair cut at Frank’s on Spring Street. It’s an unassuming barbershop just east of Sixth Avenue, complete with a revolving red, white and blue pole and metal folding chairs out front for the locals to gossip in Italian as they Read More
“Queen needs makeup!” Harvey Fierstein said.
It was late afternoon on Monday, August 5, and Mr. Fierstein, primed to return to Broadway in heels upon a hot pink, giddy steamroller-the musical version of John Waters’ Hairspray- sat before a mirror in a windowless white studio in the West Village, his face under construction for Read More
