On this day back in 1988, the film adaptation of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy opens in the United States.
Janet Maslin from The New York Times wrote “Like La Cage aux Folles, Torch Song Trilogy presents a homosexual world that any mother, with the possible exception of Arnold Beckoff’s, would love. Greatly shortened from Mr. Fierstein’s long-running, Tony Award-winning play, the film version emphasizes the lovable at every turn, but the surprise is that it does this entertainingly and well.” Roger Ebert commented “As written and performed by Harvey Fierstein as a long-running stage hit, it was seen as a sort of nostalgic visit to the problems that gays had in the years before the horror of AIDS. The movie has more or less the same focus, but because it’s a movie, it becomes more intimate and intense.”
It also features Matthew Broderick at the peak of his youthful cuteness.
