Harvey Fierstein Worked With Andy Warhol Before Making Broadway History
Hairspray, La Cage aux Folles, and Torch Song Trilogy — Harvey Fierstein was simply a student at New York’s Pratt Institute, one who had no intention of pursuing a life onstage. “I didn’t want to be an actor.
I didn’t want to be a writer. That was not in my vocabulary. Not in my wants at all.”Fierstein had acted in small parts in community theater and school productions, but what he wanted was to become a visual artist like Andy Warhol.
Having discovered and fallen in love with Warhol’s drawings of shoes in ads for Bloomingdale’s, Fierstein quickly became a devotee, so when he saw that there was an open call for a new play, Pork, written by none other than Warhol himself, Fierstein went to the audition. “Not to get a role in the show but to meet him, and of course, who’s there?
Not Andy Warhol," he recounts on this week's LGBTQ&A podcast. (Click here to listen.) Armed with Juliet’s monologue from her famous balcony scene with Romeo (“Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face, else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek...”), Fierstein went through with the audition, wowed those in attendance, and was cast in the role of a young female maid.
