Harvey Fierstein, that gravel-voiced Pulitzer Prize winner, is back on Broadway — and wearing a dress, again.

By Bill Corsello
MetroSource

Here are three reasons to be shocked that Harvey Fierstein is back in drag, starring on Broadway: 1. After his landmark Torch Song Trilogy, he vowed never to dress in girls’ garb again. 2. He has described life on stage as merciless. 3. It’s a musical.

Yet here’s Harvey, one-year contract in hand, his distinctive gurgle of a voice trained to warble, succumbing to the high maintenance of becoming a woman. And he’s in pain.

“They just ripped all the hair out of my body!” Fierstein moans. “What have I signed on for?”

He has signed on for the big Broadway musical adaptation of John Waters’s 1988 cult-classic film Hairspray. The show follows the adventures of Tracy Turnblad, a zaftig teen living in 1962 Baltimore who garners fame dancing on an American Bandstand-like show and winds up bringing racial integration to the local airwaves. Fierstein has been tapped to play Edna Turnblad, the meek housewife–cum–sassy stage mom inhabited in the movie by the late, great Divine.

Whereas in Torch Song he played a drag queen, this time he is playing an out-and-out female, gladly suffering through the preparation it entails. “Today we did the chest,” he says. “That crazy [costume designer] William Ivey Long wants me beautiful. For a buxom woman like me, that means showing a little décolletage.”

Hairspray came around at the right time. “I didn’t want to write a new play; I’ve sort of been fighting that,” Fierstein admits. The show’s creative team, including director Jack O’Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell (both of The Full Monty), composer and co-lyricist Marc Shaiman (South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut), requested that he audition. “I went in and I sang for them. And I sang for them and I sang for them and I sang for them. They made me sing every song I knew. I just assumed they were trying to figure out a nice way to throw me out.”

They have since told him he had the part when he walked into the room. For Fierstein, it is the achievement of a lifelong goal. “When you have a voice like this, you dream of singing in a musical,” he says. “I have my Ethel Merman fantasies.”

Fierstein’s absence from the stage is due to the dread of the ennui that sets in during a long run. “You better love the role,” he says, “and I love Edna. I think Edna will keep challenging me.”

One challenge he seems to have overcome is comparisons to Divine. “I love Divine,” he says, “and what he did … but I’m playing Edna Turnblad. That’s who I owe my allegiance to.”

“As soon as I said yes to the role, I immediately thought of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘I’m Still Here.’ First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp, then someone’s mother, then you’re camp,” he sings, then considers, “Maybe I’m not doing it in the right order. I’ve already been camp.”