Harvey Fierstein, about the heart, not the clothes

He has none of his own, but it was kids who led Broadway legend Harvey Fierstein to write the book for the 2012 musical Newsies, which launches its national tour Tuesday at the Academy of Music as part of the Kimmel Center's Broadway Philadelphia series.

Fierstein didn't love the 1992 Disney movie, which failed at the box office, but it seemed that children, specifically, his brother's, did. So he used the saga of the 1899 strike by New York City's spunky, exploited newsboys ("terrible as it was") to babysit his nephews.

"Kids love it, so I had that affinity," he says. "I got stuck with the story, and there was little I could change, but, as the strike happened during the time of the women's struggle to vote, I began thinking about my own recent turn of the century," with its equally intense political and social upheavals.

So Fierstein, with composer Alan Mencken and lyricist Jack Feldman, crafted a show in which the city's young newspaper hawkers, often orphaned and homeless, organize to oppose the press lords they serve, "wanting a fair deal, beyond all else." Fierstein thought about kids working when they should have been playing or learning: "The kids' strike is about empowerment, about kids taking over - and what better message can I put in a Disney show than to have kids running the world?"

Indeed. Newsies turned a profit in seven months, was nominated for eight Tony Awards (including one for Fierstein's book), and ran for more than 1,000 performances before closing last summer.

The show might seem an odd fit for a man audiences first got to know from his cynical, semiautobiographical Torch Song Trilogy. Since that bracing 1981 dramedy about a gay man seeking what most people want - good job, nice life, partner to share it - Fierstein has become one of Broadway's go-to author/actors. His shows run the gamut from Legs Diamond (bombed) to La Cage Aux Folles (he won Tonys for best book and best actor) to Kinky Boots (best musical) to Hairspray (best actor again), inevitably with a touch of piquant wit and sociopolitical titillation.

And "always with passion," says Fierstein, 60, in his familiar broken-glass rasp. "I'm a very old person who's been around a long time, learned my lesson many years ago, and several times since: You can't do anything just for hire and be happy about it. . . . If I sign on to a project, even an adaptation of somebody else's work, I must have my personal connection to it, my personal idea for it, and my personal goals to complete it. I do not ever write without a passion. I may start without one," he laughs, "but that can't last."

Philadelphians will get a second Fierstein opportunity in April, when the Kimmel brings Kinky Boots to the Forrest Theatre. Given his past as a drag queen, it would be easy to conclude that the transvestites of Kinky Boots and the cross-dressers of his recent play Casa Valentina are a passion for Fierstein. But, he says, "I popped that transvestite cork before. There had to be more."

For Kinky Boots, written with composer Cyndi Lauper, Fierstein recalled Gloria Steinem's Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, whose message was no matter how great your parents are, you don't know how to ask for what you need. "You're raised with holes that become lack of self-esteem," Fierstein recalls. "We carry these gentle wounds that change your life."

Steinem's walking wounds gave substance to Kinky Boots' hero Charlie, a fifth-generation shoe manufacturer with no interest in cobbling. "He thought he was a failure to his father."

Then there's Lola (birth name Simon), the charismatic drag performer who helps Charlie rescue his failing factory. "Same thing with Lola, whose father was a boxer, and wanted Lola to box - not against what his son was, but for: It's hard enough for kids, let alone kids who are big old sissies. Running around in a dress, you better know how to take care of yourself. Lola's dad taught him to box out of love."

Fierstein laughs, recalling how his father knew what his son was, and took it with a deep sigh. "He called my brother and I bondit, Yiddish for criminal or rascal, poor thing. My brother wanted to rock-and-roll. I was an artist.

"Luckily, he saw me get my Actors Equity card before he passed, but I knew it was hard for him. Those thoughts can paralyze us, but they shouldn't, because our parents love us. Kids just judge themselves too harshly."

With all his success and talk of parents and children, what would Torch Song Trilogy's character Arnold Beckoff - a gay Jewish drag queen having an affair with an older bisexual man, and based upon the life of its creator - think of Fierstein now?

The seldom-speechless Fierstein pauses, and mentions never looking back. Then he tells a story. While he was doing press for Casa Valentina at a SoHo bar, in walked the man on whom he had based Arnold Beckoff's lover. "I was 20 when he was 35. The affair ended in 1975. I've seen him since, but we hadn't been in each other's company for 18 years."

After compliments and catching up, Fierstein realized that here was the man with whom he had been ready to spend the rest of his life - until the man married a woman.

"Life froze for him, which is OK. But I had this realization: Had he not chickened out, it could've been the same for me. We would have wound up together, and by now I'd be a retired schoolteacher rather than what it is I became.

"Because of this, I tell kids to never cry over not getting what you wanted, because if we all got it, we'd be married to our second-grade teachers. Be grateful for life's journey, you know? I am."

Newsies

Through Sunday at the Academy of Music, Broad and Locust Streets. Tickets: $25-$115.50 215-893-1999, tickets.kimmelcenter.org.

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