Review: Lessons in Love From a Drama Queen in ‘Torch Song’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/theater/torch-song-review.html

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In life, drama queens, those extravagantly emotional beings who suck up all the oxygen in a room, are fatiguing souls, to be avoided at all costs when one is tired. But, ah, in fiction — in books and film, and especially on the stage — these same creatures can be an energizing joy, as stimulating as four shots of espresso.

That’s why I am advising you to make the acquaintance of a grade-A specimen of this spectacular genus, whose presence is overflowing the Helen Hayes Theater. His undramatic name is Arnold Beckoff, though he also goes by the more promising moniker of Virginia Ham. And, as embodied by Michael Urie in the happy revival of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song,” which opened on Thursday night, Arnold is just the guy and gal to pull you out of your election-season weariness.

He may also cause you to shed a few sentimental tears, but isn’t that what you expect of a drama queen? And wait until you meet Arnold’s mother, who is played, if you please, by Mercedes Ruehl.

Though a slender fellow, Mr. Urie reads so exultantly big in this production that you almost forget the man who indelibly created Arnold. That’s Mr. Fierstein, the author and original star of “Torch Song Trilogy,” as it was known when it shook up Broadway in the early 1980s, copping Tony Awards for best play and best leading actor in a play.

A portrait of a lovelorn, nice Jewish boy who works as a gender illusionist, that original production took mainstream theatergoers to places few had visited before, including (hilariously) a bar back room for the purposes of sweaty, anonymous sex. Yet Mr. Fierstein’s Arnold clearly belonged to a breed that Broadway has always celebrated.

I mean those natural-born stage stars who are both inescapably odd and embraceably accessible, like Carol Channing and Zero Mostel, who make eccentricities more commanding than beauty. The strapping Mr. Fierstein, with his foghorn voice and borscht belt timing, gave the world a drag queen that every mother could love, and a script with the zing of an R-rated Neil Simon comedy.

Mr. Fierstein went on to become nearly as much a staple of the mainstream theatrical landscape as Mr. Simon, both as a performer (“Hairspray”) and as a book-writer for musicals (“La Cage aux Folles”). Because of his singular status, there was some skepticism when it was announced that “Torch Song” would be part of Second Stage Theater’s Off Broadway season last year.

Yet that revival, directed by Moisés Kaufman, became such a hit that it was decided to move it for a limited run to Second Stage’s new Broadway digs, the Helen Hayes. I admired its unexpected intimacy and intensity last year, especially in the scenes between Mr. Urie and Ms. Ruehl.

Mr. Kaufman’s staging — still designed to please the eye without overwhelming it, with 1970s shorthand sets by David Zinn, costumes to match by Clint Ramos and lighting by David Lander — now feels smoother and quicker on its feet. It also feels, well, bigger.

I’m referring particularly to Mr. Urie’s performance. This nimble actor has already demonstrated canny comic chops in Off Broadway plays (Jonathan Tolins’s “Buyer & Cellar,” Gogol’s “The Government Inspector.”) But in filling Mr. Fierstein’s dauntingly big shoes on a Broadway stage, Mr. Urie stretches to color in the outsize outlines of his part.

This might have led to a strained, shrill performance. Instead, it has inspired a seriously entertaining interpretation of living large as a proactive defense against feeling small.

“A model is,” Arnold explains to a young man of that profession. “A drag queen aspires.” And as we follow the chapters of Arnold’s rocky relationship with a closeted schoolteacher, Ed (Ward Horton, pitch perfect as an almost-straight man), Mr. Urie finds a physical grandeur in such aspiration.

Even without the wigs and tarantula eyelashes of his performing alter ego, Arnold is a preternaturally heightened figure, only rarely without the battle gear of exaggeration and melodrama. His approach to life seems to be that to inflate — problems, pain, indecision — is to deflate. Hyperbole, after all, makes targets more hittable.

This means that Arnold never walks when he can bound or caper; never mists up when he can bawl; never simply says “mmm-hmm” in conversation when he can trump whatever’s been said with a top-spun joke, even at his own expense.

This is evident in his tortured relationships with Ed; with the woman Ed marries, Laurel (Roxanna Hope Radja, who winningly brings out the character’s wry masochism); and with the handsome, much younger Alan, the model (a likable Michael Hsu Rosen).

Those are the dramatis personae of the play’s first half, which on Broadway has acquired a new breeziness. The pain these people inflict on one another in the name of love (and the denial of it) always hums beneath the surface. The second half introduces us to David (Jack DiFalco, convincingly sassy if a shade too old for the part), a gay 15-year-old whom Arnold is hoping to adopt and, best of all, Mrs. Beckoff, the woman Arnold calls Ma, who arrives from Florida on a visit.

That’s Ms. Ruehl’s part, which she walks, not runs, with and nearly steals the show in an expertly coiled performance. From the moment she arrives, toting all manner of baggage, it’s clear that Ma and Arnold are of the same flesh. Even when they’re quarreling, which is much of the time, they have the synchronized rhythms of a vaudeville team.

You could even say that Ma, the homemaker with a will of iron, is ultimately what Arnold aspires to be. This makes her rejection of him, as a gay man with Good Housekeeping dreams, all the more lacerating. Not that Arnold can’t stand up to her, and not that she can’t stand up to him standing up to her — which turns their climactic face-off into a shattering battle royal.

“Torch Song” has its moments of pure sitcom — there’s a protracted scene about the awfulness of Ed’s cooking — which you can only grin and bear. But it also incorporates shadows of tragedy, including a plot turn involving a brutal hate crime, that feel sadly topical.

And there are moments when Mr. Urie’s Arnold lets us see the bona fide, bottomless fear and uncertainty beneath the larger-than-life facade. It’s there as a sudden, unexpected flicker in his eyes when he says that, at 13, “I knew everything.”

In his opening monologue, Arnold tells us: “A drag queen is like an oil painting. You gotta stand back to get the full effect.” Mr. Urie gives us that full effect, for sure. But as you come to know this dizzying, sobering and surprisingly instructive drama queen, standing back is hardly an option.