While I can’t weigh the movie of Torch Song Trilogy against the play, it certainly works effectively on its own terms, even when it betrays its theatrical origins. The movie drops the slides, shifts the action from Cleveland to Dallas, expands the play with material from Stephen Singular’s book Talked to Death: The Life and Death of Alan Berg, and adds a lengthy flashback. It opened in an expanded version as a play in New York last year, with Savinar’s slides used simply as a scenic element. Talk Radio, about a caustic radio talk-show host, started life as a performance piece staged by Eric Bogosian in Portland, Oregon, in 1985, with back-projected slides provided by artist Tad Savinar. The film has reportedly reduced the original material by about a third and pointedly relocated all of its action to the decade between 19, a period that predates the public awareness of AIDS.

It opened off-Broadway in 1981 and started a successful Broadway run the following year. Torch Song Trilogy began as three separately staged one-act plays dealing with the life of an outspoken professional female impersonator who hails from Brooklyn and works in a Manhattan club. I haven’t seen a stage version of either play, but both works have apparently undergone substantial changes in their translations to the screen. And perhaps most significantly, both are a good deal more professional, entertaining, intense, and compelling than any other new Hollywood releases around, even if their commercial fates are substantially more precarious than those of most of their competitors.

Both are effectively (if not literally) one-man shows whose auteurs are more their Jewish writer-stars than their directors, and the impact of each is directly tied to the uncommon theatrical skills of these individuals. Both deal with marginal aspects of American life that seldom find their way into the commercial mainstream, which makes them new and vital in ways that most other recent releases are not. Each was written by and stars the author of the original play - Harvey Fierstein and Eric Bogosian, respectively. McGinley, and John Pankow.Īs different as they are, Torch Song Trilogy and Talk Radio, both movie adaptations of plays, have several striking things in common. With Bogosian, Alec Baldwin, Ellen Greene, Leslie Hope, John C. With Harvey Fierstein, Anne Bancroft, Matthew Broderick, Brian Kerwin, Karen Young, Ken Page, and Eddie Castrodad. From the Chicago Reader (December 23, 1988).

Matthew broderick torch song trilogy