Harvey Fierstein (1954-)

With over fifty years in the business, it is no doubt that Harvey Fierstien is a Broadway legend. He has starred in hits like Hairspray and Fiddler on the Roof, as well as penned his own successful musicals and plays. He holds four Tony Awards in four separate categories, a feat only one other performer has ever achieved in Broadway history. Fierstein was the first openly gay man to win a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1983 for Torch Song Trilogy, for which he also won Best Play as its playwright. Much of Fierstein’s work is focused on gender and sexuality expression and he has been an outspoken advocate for gay rights through his professional career. For much of that career, Fierstein was involved in drag performance and while he does not identify as non-binary, Fierstein appreciates and recognizes his own kind of gender fluidity.   

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1954, Fierstein had a very traditional American-Jewish upbringing, attending Hebrew school and celebrating his bar mitzvah. He describes his childhood neighbourhood as “Jew-centric”,   where his family belonged to a Conservative synagogue. Nowadays, Fierstein identifies as a culturally Jewish atheist. Before starting on Broadway, he worked as a drag queen in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. Fierstein’s play, Torch Song Trilogy (1981), is centred around Jewish gay drag queen, Arnold Beckoff, as he tries to find love and build a family. The play is infused with Yiddishkeit, with Arnold throwing Yiddishisms around and dealing with his mother from Florida. The finale of the play, an argument between Arnold and his mother, is a reconciliation between the two as an overbearing Jewish mother begins to respect her homosexual son’s life. The play brings forth both identities, gay and Jewish, as representation and a rejection of their stereotypification. 

Torch Song was just the beginning of Fierstein in Jewish roles, as he later would step in as Tevye in the 2004 Fiddler on the Roof American tour. Fierstein understood the importance of representation on the stage, when he first saw Fiddler as a young boy, in awe of a stage full of Jews just like him. Fierstein is deeply informed by his Jewish roots, saying in an interview with the Jewish publication Forward, “every time you sit down at your desk to write, you bring everything you know… talmudic teaching and reasoning are somewhere in me.” 

Fierstein, an unapologetically Jewish and gay man, has found profound success on the Broadway stage and beyond. From working with Andy Warhol in 1971 to voicing Yao in Disney’s Mulan (1998), Fierstein has taken on a wide range of roles. He originated the iconic role of Edna Turnblad in Hairspray (2002) and often stars in his own work. He is not just an actor, but also a very successful playwright and musical book writer with credits like La Cage aux Folles, Newsies, and Kinky Boots. Harvey Fierstein is one of the most well-known theatre actors and an important cultural figure who embraces and advocates the LGBTQ+ community.

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