This is the first time the picture has been released on DVD, and it includes a feature-length audio commentary by Fierstein. The VHS version is already in stores.
On May 2, Fierstein ends his Tony Award-winning turn in Hairspray on Broadway.
Fierstein wrote and stars in the praised 1988 film adaptation of his hit, groundbreaking 1982-83 Tony Award-winning play, Torch Song Trilogy. He plays Arnold, a female impersonator and nightclub singer who must learn to deal not only with his unaccepting mother (played by Anne Bancroft) but also with the three loves of his life: his first lover Ed (Brian Kerwin); Alan (Matthew Broderick), the lover he lost; and David (Eddie Castrodad), the boy he wants to adopt.
The original Broadway run of the ambitious three-act Torch Song Trilogy co-starred Estelle Getty and Fisher Stevens. Fierstein won Tonys for Best Play and Best Actor in 1983.
The early '80s play is a period piece that fits in a sort of in between place gay history: After Stonewall but before corporate partner benefits, only shortly after the first blush of the AIDS epidemic, some 15 years before the murder of Matthew Shepard, 20 years before the current debate about gay marriage. It's a dramatic sitcom that existed in a world that could not yet imagine the mainstream appeal of "Will & Grace," "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," "The L Word" and "Queer as Folk."
The play and its national tour and subsequent film would speak to a new generation about the evolving place gays had in the American landscape, and would let closeted pre "Will & Grace" gay folks know they could, like straight people, strive to have open and happy lives with a spouse, a child and parents who cared.
Fierstein would late win a Best Book Tony Award for the musical, La Cage aux Folles, a revival of which is in the works for 2004-05.
A Broadway revival of Torch Song Trilogy is also in development.
The DVD also contains a 16 x 9 Widescreen version of the film, DTS Surround Sound (English), 5.1 Surround Sound (English), Stereo Surround Sound (English), English subtitles and closed captions, Spanish subtitles, animated menus, the theatrical trailer and additional trailers from other New Line Home Entertainment titles.
