TORCH SONG


Michael Mullen delivers a career-best performance as Arnold Beckoff in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, now making its long-awaited local debut at Santa Monica’s venerable Morgan-Wixson Theatre.

 Diehard theater aficionados will recall Arnold as the drag queen protagonist of 1981’s Torch Song Trilogy, a now time-capsule look at post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS gay life in New York City.

Fast-forward to 2017 and the nearly four-hour-long Torch Song Trilogy’s rebirth as Torch Song, an hour-shorter two-act play in which Mullen does Fierstein’s alter ego proud with a particularly fine featured cast supporting him every step of the way.

The result is an alternately hilarious and moving production marred only by a seriously deficient lighting design in its final third.

 Part One introduces us to Arnold in full drag queen mode, the loquacious night club entertainer navigating the pre-AIDS New York City bar scene, back rooms and all, while embarking on a romantic relationship with handsome bisexual Ed Reiss (Harrison Hume Smith).

 Part Two then flashes forward a year to a weekend in the country that has Arnold and his “shamelessly beautiful” eighteen-year-old boyfriend Alan (Stephen Gregg) awkwardly sharing farmhouse digs with Ed and his seemingly understanding new girlfriend Laurel (Amanda Meade-Tatum).

Part Three completes Torch Song post-intermission with Arnold welcoming his loving but overbearing mother (Paige Morrow Kimball) for a visit to the Manhattan apartment he now shares with David (Arnaldo Andres), the gay teen foster child he plans to adopt.

Stylistically speaking, Torch Song’s three parts could not be more different, going from a series of Arnold monologs and scenes with Ed in Part One, to Arnold and Alan and Ed and Laurel sharing a quadruple bed in various pairings in Part Two, to a more traditionally written and staged Part Three set in Arnold’s New York apartment.

All of this adds up to one powerhouse play as Arnold first despairs of finding true love, then finds it, then loses it, and ultimately finds it again in the most unexpected of ways.

It’s a role that made Harvey Fierstein a double-Tony-winning Broadway star as both playwright and actor and now gives Mullen, fresh from his Scenie-winning featured turn as Buzz in Kentwood Player’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, the chance to make another multifaceted gay character fabulously and ferociously his own.

 And if Part One features Mullen in drag queen mode (sweet and sarcastic, hard-shelled and mush-hearted, and never less than heartbreakingly real) and Part Two as a gay man torn between two lovers, just wait until an eleventh-hour confrontation with Mama gives him the chance to reveal powerhouse dramatic chops that may well have you in tears.

And Mullen isn’t the only actor from whom director Jeffrey Lesser has elicited memorable work.

Smith is absolutely terrific as the deeply conflicted Ed, the role of Laurel gives Meade-Tatum the chance to prove that she can do more than just sing and dance in musicals, Gregg is so charming and adorable an Alan, it’s no wonder Arnold is deeply and forever smitten, and Andres is feisty, fabulous perfection as sassy gay teen David.

 Last but not least, Kimball is on fire as Arnold’s deeply loving but not entirely accepting mother, her eleventh-hour confrontation with Mullen’s Arnold as compelling and cathartic a scene as you’ll see all year.

Only where production design is concerned Torch Song does Torch Song prove less than professional.

 On the plus side, Mullen’s costumes are fine choices for both Fierstein’s characters and the play’s late 1970s time frame, and William Wilder’s workmanlike set goes from the limbo of Parts One and Two to a rather well-realized apartment set in Part Three.

 Unfortunately, though Ella Nelson’s spotlight lighting is okay in the production’s earlier limbo scenes, it is so haphazard in Part Three, leaving actors too often in relative darkness, that it’s almost as if there were no lighting design at all.

Finally, though Elija Saintlouis receives program credit as sound technician, an actual sound designer would have known better than to leave repeated blackouts and scene changes in absolute silence.

Torch Song is produced by Ann Villella. Emily Walker is production stage manager and Andre Chorbi is assistant stage manager. Ariella Salinas Fiore is intimacy director. Wilder is technical director.

Design issues aside, Torch Song is Morgan-Wixson Theatre at its best, and in Michael Mullen’s compelling star turn, Harvey Fierstein’s Arnold stands out and proud.

Morgan-Wixson Theatre, 2627 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica.
www.morgan-wixson.org

–Steven Stanley
September 28, 2025
Photos: Joel Castro

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