Mother of the Bride.(A Catered Affair)(Theater review)

"A Catered Affair" (at the Walter Kerr) is a musical based on Paddy Chayefsky's 1955 teleplay, "The Catered Affair," which starred the brilliant Brooklyn-born character actress Thelma Ritter. On the television program, Ritter played Aggie Hurley, a bossy Irish-American matriarch who longs to throw a lavish wedding for her daughter--a catered affair--and who nearly undoes her working-class family in the process. The original version, though it had been much anticipated, was a failure with the critics. (Chayefsky had far more success composing for the big screen, winning an Academy Award for screenwriting in 1955 for "Marty," and then in 1971 and 1976 for "The Hospital" and "Network," respectively.) In a 1969 tribute to Ritter, Chayefsky acknowledged the play's pitfalls: "The first act was farce and the second was character-comedy and the third was abruptly drama." He went on, "There aren't a dozen actresses who could make one piece out of all that; Miss Ritter, of course, did."

Indeed, it takes an exceptionally strong performer to assemble the shards of Chayefsky's kitchen- and bathroom-sink comedy-drama into a whole without destroying the slight, predictable work altogether. In 1956, Gore Vidal adapted Chayefsky's work for a film version starring Bette Davis. Davis made a credible if somewhat too funky Aggie, with a tightly fitted curly wig and impasto-thick lipstick. Vidal added new material to the script, including a fine monologue about marital responsibility that brought out Davis's singular testiness.

The film was a commercial failure, but somehow it had a profound enough effect on Harvey Fierstein so that he sought, for more than twenty years, to bring a version to the stage. (Fierstein wrote the book, and also plays Aggie's live-in bachelor brother, Winston.) Many good musicals have been inspired by lesser material, but Fierstein's additions to the already corny story--the most significant being that Winston is now a gay man, and one who is surprisingly uninhibited for the Bronx in 1953--feel contrived and tacked on. In the nineteen-eighties, having established himself in small downtown venues like La MaMa, Fierstein made the leap from the East Village to Broadway, with works like the Tony Award-winning "Torch Song Trilogy" (1982) and "La Cage aux Folles" (1983), for which he wrote the book. For a while, Fierstein was able to win us over with his moxie and his raspy voice, but now one feels merely puzzled by the fact that he seems to equate gayness with shtick. His Winston is the kind of queen who is tailor-made to charm audiences: witty but recessive, neutered by irony.

As the musical opens, Winston ambles onstage sporting a gray fedora and a light-brown suit. He gazes at images of tenements projected across the wall behind him. After a few moments, flats representing the facade of the tenement where the Hurley family lives are wheeled out. (The effective, minimal set design is by David Gallo.) Is Winston conjuring up all this scenery? Is "A Catered Affair" now Winston's memory play, his sweet revenge for having been relegated to the margins of Chayefsky's original vision? Who knows. Winston's largely silent, knowing presence during this and other moments in the production is among the many unexplained choices made by John Doyle, the director of "A Catered Affair," which is alternately as obscuring as fog and as loud and distracting as a bag of cicadas. John Bucchino's vague lyrics and ultimately forgettable music are no more than an aural smudge in the shockingly conventional production.

After Winston's appearance, three neighborhood women poke their heads out their windows to share the news ...