'A Catered Affair' Opens, with Courage

NEW YORK -- The first sound you hear in “A Catered Affair,” the new musical that opened last night at the Walter Kerr theater, is a solo muted trumpet. It’s a courageous way to open a Broadway show, with a sound so bleak and mournful, but then this is a very courageous show.

To begin with, the material hardly offers conventional pretexts for singing and dancing. Derived from the 1956 movie, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, based on the teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky (fresh from his success with “Marty”), it is a story about poor people in the Bronx. A young couple, Janey and Ralph, want to get married quickly so they can take advantage of an opportunity to drive cross-country in a friend’s car for free, offering them an extended honeymoon.

But Janey’s mother Aggie, compensating for the ill will created by her own perfunctory wedding, wants to give her daughter a grand sendoff. As the planning for The Catered Affair (the movie title had the definite rather than the indefinite article) begins, the sadness buried not far the family’s placid, pleasant surfaces begins to emerge. Rather than compound the mounting unhappiness, the young bride decides to go with her original instincts and have a ten-minute ceremony at City Hall.

The movie is a marvel of economy, rarely leaving the cramped apartment where Janey, Aggie, her husband Tom and Aggie’s bachelor uncle Winston live but conveying a deep sense of the complex, forlorn textures of their lives. Harvey Fierstein has fashioned an equally economical book from these materials, making only one major change. The bachelor uncle, played by Barry Fitzgerald in the movie, is now gay and played by Fierstein himself, making the character a source of idiosyncratic humor to leaven this family’s generally tense mood.

Andre Previn wrote the background score for the film. (In one scene, in an unglamorous night club, you can hear a piano solo of ‘‘I’ll Never Stop Loving You” in the background – I have a hunch it’s Previn.) The musical’s score is by Broadway newcomer John Bucchino, whose songs have been sung by artists as diverse as Judy Collins, Patti LuPone and Deborah Voigt. Bucchino has done an astonishing job, reflecting the characters and their sad milieu in simple melodies and savvy lyrics without ever falling into Broadway clichés.

When, for example, Jane’s father Tom (powerfully played and sung by Tom Wopat) finally releases years of pent-up frustration in “I Stayed” near the end, the emotional climax comes well before the coda. Traditionally the song would end with the big high notes, to encourage fervent applause. But here it faithfully captures his descent back into the helplessness that has characterized so much of his life.

Bucchino’s melodic gifts are everywhere apparent, as in the young couple’s duet, “Don’t Ever Stop Saying, ‘I Love You,’” in which his long, lyrical lines help project the plaintiveness of the lyrics. He’s also a sophisticated lyricist, as when Janey contemplates the idea of “dressing up” for the wedding:

I wasn’t one of those silly little girls
Those perfect pink and frilly little girls
Who long to wear makeup
Just aching to cake up their pores.
Makeup still bores me.

The tune reflects the unconventional rhyme scheme and the equally brittle rhythmic structure. Jonathan Tunick’s lean, chamber orchestration accentuates the elegance of the material. Toward the beginning a vocal quartet is supported in the orchestra by a woodwind ensemble. Some of the songs have a celeste obbligato.

The cast is tremendous, led by Faith Prince as Aggie, who gives the subtlest but most emotionally rich performance I have ever seen her give. Fierstein is also admirably restrained, heightening his character’s poignancy. As Janey and Ralph, Leslie Kritzer and Matt Cavenaugh are deeply appealing.

The show is directed by John Doyle, whose revivals of Sondheim shows (“Sweeney Todd” and “Company”) have been much acclaimed, though not by me. He also directed the recent unprepossessing “Peter Grimes” at the Metropolitan Opera. But here he has done an impressive job of bringing a delicate piece to the stage without sacrificing its fragility or losing it depth. He is helped enormously by the painterly lighting of Brian MacDevitt. David Gallo’s sets and Ann Hould-Ward’s costumes convey the Bronx with charm and simple dignity.

“A Catered Affair” is hardly the average Broadway ticket buyer’s idea of A Night On the Town. It will be interesting to see if this challenging show finds the discerning audience it deserves.