Playwrights Kenneth Lonergan, Harvey Fierstein and Mart Crowley – each of whom had older works produced on Broadway this season – will be eligible for Tony Awards, the Tony administration committee has determined. The eligibilities were among a raft of such rulings made by the committee today in the third of four…

Torch Song playwright Harvey Fierstein’s new biographical play about New York’s legendary, hat-wearing “political firebrand” Bella Abzug will make its world premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club Off Broadway next October, with Fierstein himself taking the title role. A solo show, Bella Bella, directed by Kimberly…

The Actors Fund has named playwright Harvey Fierstein, actress Rita Moreno, Broadway producer John Gore and IATSE president Matthew D. Loeb as its 2019 Medal of Honor recipients. The awards will be handed out at the Fund’s annual gala on Monday, April 29. "Harvey, John, Matthew and Rita are legends in our community,"…

Harvey Fierstein’s glorious voice, that frog with a human stuck in it, remains so powerful you might swear you still hear it, loud and, well, loud in a Torch Song that can often only shout over the Harvey-shaped hole at its center. Last year’s hit Off Broadway revival, Torch Song (nee Torch Song Trilogy, the…

Refresh for updates. An outpouring of fond remembrances is filling the online world as news of Neil Simon’s death spreads. Actors and others who worked with him saluted his career, and those who merely enjoyed his works also shared their thoughts on one of the world’s most popular playwrights. Simon died last night in…

Shorter by a big word and a long act, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy is back, trim, glittering and rechristened, simply, Torch Song. Michael Urie (Buyer & Cellar, Ugly Betty‘s Marc St. James) and Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl (The Fisher King) play nice Jewish drag queen Arnold Beckoff and his loving, if…

Tony and Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl has signed on for Second Stage Theatre’s fall revival of Harvey Fierstein’s landmark dramedy Torch Song. Michael Urie will star as looking-for-love gay drag artist Arnold Beckoff, the role originated by Fierstein, which ran more than 1,200 performances in the 1980s and earned…

Off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theater today unveiled plans for the inaugural productions at its Broadway flagship, the Helen Hayes Theatre, as well as co-commissions of new work in collaboration with several of the country’s best-known non-profit companies. The Hayes, the smallest of Broadway’s 41 designated houses, is…

Kevin Kline has loomed, larger than life, over Broadway for more than four decades: as the preening, prat-falling Pirate King opposite Linda Ronstadt in The Pirates of Penzance; the proboscoid panache-flaunting poet Cyrano de Bergerac; the narcissistic hunk Bruce Granit in On The Twentieth Century, among other choice…

Second Stage Theatre will present a revival of Harvey Fierstein's groundbreaking seriocomedy Torch Song Trilogy, renamed simply Torch Song and staged by Moisés Kaufman, this fall at the company’s off-Broadway Tony Kiser Theatre on West 43rd Street. Previews will begin September 26. Michael Urie, winner of the…

Dick Latessa, the veteran song-and-dance man who stole hearts as Wilbur Turnblad in the original Broadway production of Hairspray, has died. His death at 87 was announced by the Broadway League’s Tony Awards web site. “He owned the part. He was the real thing — a generous, big-hearted artist whose talent and profession…

There were several firsts in Hairspray Live!, NBC’s fourth annual telecast of a Broadway musical (following The Sound Of Music, Peter Pan and last year’s The Wiz!) from exec producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan. The hit tuner about 1962 Baltimore and one chubby teenage girl’s determination to integrate an American Band…