A Catered Affair - Original Broadway Cast Recording

As most critics pointed out, there is plenty wrong with A Catered Affair, the musical based on the 1956 movie (screenplay by Gore Vidal), based on a 1955 teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky. For the musical adaptation, Harvey Fierstein wrote the book, and John Bucchino the songs.

Fierstein's version is full of elements that seem anachronistic to the period, as in a premarital bedroom scene (in the Eisenhower '50s!) and in turning bibulous heterosexual Uncle Jack into outspokenly homosexual Uncle Winston. Fierstein's playing him cute doesn't help either.

Irish-American cabdriver Tom Hurley and his wife, Aggie, are the unhappily married parents of Janie, around whose impending marriage to schoolteacher Ralph it all revolves. The young people want a simple, quick City Hall wedding; Aggie strives for a big, splashy one (such as she never had), on which Tom's hard-earned savings for part-ownership of his cab would end up spent. Winston plans something equally elaborate, though hurt by not being considered "immediate family" by the Hurleys with whom he lodges. Ralph's affluent parents, the Hallorans, envisage something even bigger. Finally, the whole thing blows up and City Hall it will be.

The 52-minute original cast recording manages to include goodly chunks of Fierstein's dialogue, which helps to convey the story but is fairly prosaic—though perhaps no more so than the musical numbers. The lyrics, richer in rhymes than in original ideas, are passable. The problem is the music, which for long stretches makes the show into Seven Characters in Search of a Tune. Bucchino offers mostly recitative or a kind of tuneless tune, with the orchestra given over largely to vamping and underscoring.

[IMG:R]A couple of musical numbers make dramatic sense, but could just as well have been dialogue for all the melody they contribute. Bona fide songs are, in my view, only three: Aggie's lament ("Married"); Janie's succumbing to the lure of a big wedding while trying on a bridal gown and admiring herself in the mirror ("One White Dress"); and the young lovers' duet on a drab Bronx fire escape ("Don't Ever Stop Saying 'I Love You'"). Yet even these will easily slip from memory.

The performances are not to be faulted, although no one sounds very Irish. Faith Prince is a moving Aggie despite her delusions of fleeting grandeur, and sings here with a touchingly reedy voice. Tom Wopat, as her finally exploding husband, makes the most of the rather unmelodious "I Stayed," listing the good reasons and chances for bolting from the marriage that he staunchly resisted.

Working girl Leslie Kritzer and teacher fiancé Matt Cavenaugh are a vocally engaging engaged couple, and lesser roles are decently taken. But then there is Fierstein. Some people may find his croak endearing, as when, in Hairspray, it was used mostly for comedy and a touch of pathos. But here, as Winston, when he is either defiantly self-assertive or self-pityingly whiny, a croak remains a croak and you wish to bid him a froggy, froggy adieu.

The teleplay and the movie were called The Catered Affair. By changing its title to A Catered Affair, the musical moves ahead in the alphabetic listings. Everywhere else, it lags behind.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.