HUMOR, yes, but humanity? That’s rare in a Broadway musical. When it does come along – as it did last night, when “A Catered Affair” opened at the Walter Kerr – hug it to your heart.
Under John Doyle’s expert, discreet direction, it emerges less like a musical and more like a play with music: lovely, urban chamber music. But you won’t come out humming the tunes, or even the scenery.
You’ll come out humming the characters.
Harvey Fierstein’s book is nominally based on Gore Vidal’s screenplay for the 1956 movie, which in turn was taken from Paddy Chayefsky’s teleplay, presumably as a starring vehicle for Ernest Borgnine.
But it’s Chayefsky’s spirit that dominates the scene, and Fierstein has captured his 1950s, working-class milieu to perfection.
This Bronx tale, with its interlocking, underlining and quietly beautiful music and lyrics by John Bucchino, skims along the edge of sentimentality to find honest sentiment in this story of a young soldier’s death, a wedding and a taxi.
As it starts, the soldier’s parents, Aggie (Faith Prince) and Tom (Tom Wopat), a taxi driver, have just received their country’s thanks: a folded flag and a small government check.
Their daughter Janey (Leslie Kritzer) has had a bit of luck, though: the chance to wed her boyfriend, Ralph (Matt Cavenaugh), and a free honeymoon, ferrying a friend’s car to California.
Tom also has an opportunity. The taxi owner is ready to sell it to him and his partner, making them owner-drivers instead of hired hands. The money he’s got together is enough to seal the deal.
And then there’s Janey’s wedding. Her wish is that it be small – just the bride and groom, the four parents and a matron of honor. Not even Winston (Fierstein himself, and happily, always himself), Aggie’s bachelor brother, who sleeps on a pullout bed in their living room, is invited.
Aggie has other plans. Determined to give her daughter the wedding she never had, she plans a catered affair that keeps getting bigger. “A life savings flushed down the drain,” Tom moans, “to feed dinner to a bunch of strangers.”
Fierstein has built up his role as the uncle, played by Barry Fitzgerald in the movie (only Fierstein’s uncle is gay), and anytime he can find a chance to climb up onto that stage with a grin and a growl is fine with me.
Still, though he’s as explosively expansive as ever, he plays second fiddle to Prince and Wopat.
They embody the pinch of the chronic struggle not to be poor, to keep just a bit ahead of whatever game it is the world is playing. Grayness is eating their lives, leaving Aggie sullen and Tom defeatedly disinterested.
Both reveal themselves in one moment of abandoned truth – Aggie as she watches her daughter try on a wedding gown, and Tom, in their kitchen, trying with a fierce and uncontrollable anger to make sense of a grinding life.
These are not musical- comedy stereotypes – these are people. So is Kritzer’s marvelously layered Janey, as a working-class daughter suddenly presented with an image of glamour in a never-to-be-forgotten wedding.
This is no run-of-the-mill Broadway musical – there’s no chorus, no dancing. Just evocative music (perfectly orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick) interwoven with spoken dialogue, an authentically devised set by David Gallo and Ann Hould-Ward’s brilliantly drab costumes.
It’s simply a musical with an honest heart, and that’s enough.
A CATERED AFFAIR
Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St.; (212) 239-6200.