Book Review: I Was Better Last Night

(Received as a birthday present) Harvey Fierstein's entertaining memoir covers his amazing career with humor and insight. From community theater in Brooklyn to drag avant-garde at LaMama and with Andy Warhol to his Tony-winning breakthrough in Torch Song Trilogy to becoming Broadway's go-to book author for musicals like La Cage Aux Folles, Kinky Boots, Newsies, and A Catered Affair, Fierstein's career trajectory has been unique. No one else has succeeded as an actor, writer and gay trailblazer, on such a scale. What's really shocking is reading how being gay was so totally anathema to the majority of American society when Harvey was starting out. I remember when Torch Song was on Broadway, they didn't even mention that it was about a gay drag queen in the commercial. (Happy audience members gushed how it was about love.) That play took the revolutionary stance that gay people wanted the same thing as straight people--love, marriage, children, etc.--not endless booze, sex and partying. In addition to backstage tales of his many credits as playwright and star, Fierstein delivers the goods on his personal life, detailing how his sexuality has affected his relationships with his parents (difficult) and brother (supportive), as well his struggles with alcoholism and many medical procedures.

Side note: As in Mary Rodgers and Barbra Streisand's book, Arthur Laurents does not come off well.

2019-20 Broadway Season Forecast

July is here and that means the 2018-19 Broadway season is officially done with and the next one is underway. Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, the revival of Terrence McNally's 1988 two-hander, was the first official production of the season, opening in May. The summer is pretty slow this year with only two Broadway openings confirmed--Moulin Rouge, the stage version of Baz Luhrmann's gaudy and superficial 2001 film musical and Sea Wall/A Life, a transfer of a pair of solo pieces starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge which played the Public Theater earlier this year. Tea at Five, the one-woman play starring Faye Dunaway as Katharine Hepburn, was supposed to open sometime during the summer, as was an all-female staging of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. But neither ever secured a theater and their future is uncertain. Tea at Five is now playing Boston's Huntington Theater through July 14.

Here's a rundown of announced Broadway openings for 2019-20:

Charlie Cox, Zawe Ashton, and Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal.
Credit: Marc Brenner

Betrayal: Harold Pinter's reverse-chronicle triangle drama returns to Broadway for its third revival with Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox making their Broadway debuts after a smashing success in London's West End. (Original: 1980 with Raul Julia, Blythe Danner, and Roy Scheider, Reprised in 2001 with Liev Schreiber, Juliette Binoche and John Slattery, and in 2013 with Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Rafe Spall). (Jacobs/Sept. 15)

Derren Brown: Secret--The magician and mentalist brings his Drama Desk winning show to Broadway after a run at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2017.

The Height of the Storm--Manhattan Theater Club opens its Broadway season with this drama by French playwright Florian Zeller starring Eileen Atkins and Jonathan Pryce repeating their London performances as a couple who, not unlike the protagonists of Zeller's plays The Father and The Mother, face uncertainty and despair after decades of marriage.

Broadway Season Update

Harvey Fierstein

The fall theater season is kicking off and announcements for March and April openings are pouring in. Aladdin, Cabaret, Rocky, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch have now set definite dates and theaters, crowding the spring 2014 schedule in the race to make the deadline before the Tony Awards. In addition, Manhattan Theater Club has just filled its late spring slot at the Samuel J. Friedman with Casa Valentina, a new play by Harvey Fierstein, his first non-musical in almost 30 years. (The last was Safe Sex, a trio of one-acts which had a brief 1987 run as an attempt to follow up on the smash success of Torch Song Trilogy.) The new play is set at a 1962 Catskills resort which caters to straight men whose favorite pastime is dressing and living as women.Gender bending has been popular on Broadway (Kinky Boots, La Cage, etc.) in recent decades and with this show and Hedwig and Kinky Boots still running, there will be plenty of cross dressing. As gays and lesbians gain more acceptance, transgendered people are becoming the last American minority you can legitimately discriminate against. (There is still a lot of bigotry and racism out there against all "others" including us gays, but the trans community has it especially hard.) Here's an updated list of Broadway and prominent Off-Broadway openings: 

Tony Eligibility Ruling Reaction

Kristine Nielsen, left, is definitely a leading lady in
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
Credit: T. Charles Erickson

Just five days before the Tony nominations are announced, the Tony Administration Committee met and made its final ruling as to who's eligible in which category. To paraphrase Charles Dickens (or the 1950s movie version of A Christmas Carol), the reaction from the theater blogosphere has resembled a chorus of scalded cats. The two biggest causes for brouhaha concern are the four young actresses playing the title role in Matilda and the status of Kristine Nielsen of Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. The talented quartet of little girls who alternate as Roald Dahl's spunky genius were ruled ineligible for Best Actress in a Musical and will be awarded a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theater. All that is very fine, but it breaks precedence with the Billy Elliot boys. The three young men who alternated in that role were considered eligible as a single, joint nominee for Best Actor in a Musical, and won. What's the difference here? It is because there are four as opposed to three? Or perhaps the Matilda producers did not want to have to give Tony voters free tickets on four separate occasions and lose all that income? This happens with the Tonys all the time. Unlike the Supreme Court, they do not abide by previous cases. There have been plenty of times when actors has been considered leading AND featured for the same role--Zena Walker and Stockard Channing both played the same part in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. But Walker won a Featured Tony and Channing triumphed in the leading category when the play was revived. same with Joel Grey and Alan Cumming in Cabaret.