It’s truly heartbreaking.” Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl in Torch Song. The audience is shocked when she says those things, and appalled. “That was an accepted opinion and was totally normal for people to think. “They didn’t think anything of it - that was commonplace,” explains Urie of the controversial dialogue, which was written in 1979. Beckoff’s lines, including: “If I’d known you were going to be gay, I wouldn’t have bothered.”
The play is a transfer from an Off-Broadway run at Second Stage Theatre this past winter, where audiences gasped at some of Mrs. Beckoff - played by Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl - feels his homosexuality is both an unwise choice as well as a sickness. The story - originally called Torch Song Trilogy, which was shortened to just Torch Song when the three-act drama was condensed from four hours to two hours and 35 minutes - centers on Arnold Beckoff (Urie), a gay Jewish man who dresses in drag during the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York City. It’s time to do Torch Song and Michael Urie is Arnold.’” Michael Urie in Torch Song. “I called him up and said, ‘In order to do Torch Song, you need the right Arnold.
So Jackson, who remained close with Fierstein ever since that pen-pal exchange, dialed his number. He is not only hysterically funny, but he just grows empathy in you,” Jackson says of the actor and playwright. “Who couldn’t use a dose of Harvey Fierstein right now? We are all so full of angst, rage, and upset. The right time for a revival, Jackson feels, is now. What they didn’t know was Jackson had already written Fierstein a fan letter, to which he replied with the advice: “Take things slow and easy in life.
To his surprise, they called him in for a meeting and introduced him to Fierstein. Jackson was a student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts when he wrote to the producers listed in his Playbill, asking them for feedback on how to raise money for a college production he was working on.
“It’s been a road map of a life that could be possible,” Jackson says of worshipping the 1982 show written by Tony Award winner Harvey Fierstein. When Broadway producer Richie Jackson was 17, the play Torch Song Trilogy changed his life.
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