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Catered Affair, A
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REVIEW ARCHIVE
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Synopsis: In 1953, relationships are strained to the limit when a Bronx couple must choose whether to spend their life savings on a family business or to launch their only daughter's marriage with a lavish catered affair.
Reviews
NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW:
"There aren’t a lot of laughs in A Catered Affair, the undramatic new musical drama of disappointed lives in the age of Eisenhower, which opened Thursday night at the Walter Kerr Theater."
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
NEWSDAY REVIEW:
"How bold to make a Broadway musical on such restrained material as A Catered Affair. How sad that the results are so glum. Despite the dedication of a fine cast, including Faith Prince, Tom Wopat and author Harvey Fierstein, this is a colorless little piece of '50s social realism about a Bronx family that isn't so much emotionally repressed as emotionally deficient."
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
USA TODAY REVIEW:
"As pop culture grows coarser and snarkier by the minute, a quiet revolution is taking place on Broadway. With new revivals of classics such as Gypsy and South Pacific and original shows as diverse as last season's Spring Awakening and Grey Gardens and this year's Passing Strange and In the Heights, writers and directors are rejecting the glib satire and empty bombast that have cheapened commercial musical theater in recent decades. A Catered Affair, which opened Thursday at the Walter Kerr Theatre, shares with those musicals an emphasis on characters drawn with passion and compassion, and handled with that most quaint of virtues: dignity."
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
VARIETY REVIEW:
"Musicals are generally expected to heighten emotions, to transport the characters to some elevated plane of self-expression, whether it's love or loss, laughs or sorrow. So it seems an almost radical step when a show is as deliberately and uniformly subdued as A Catered Affair, adapted from Paddy Chayefsky's 1955 teleplay and Gore Vidal's screenplay for the movie the following year. Composer John Bucchino's melodious score never seeks to overpower the action but instead to feed the dramatic texture, subtly interwoven with book writer Harvey Fierstein's dialogue to create a show that's less a conventional musical than a semi-sung play."
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS REVIEW:
"Harvey Fierstein has contributed a lot to the Broadway stage, from Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage aux Folles to his tour de force in Hairspray. But his latest effort, A Catered Affair, which he initiated, wrote and appears in, regretfully isn't his finest hour - make that, hour and a half. The show, which opened last night, seems well-intentioned but doesn't deliver enough story, substance or satisfaction. It's about poor people, yes, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have meat on the bone and icing on the cake."
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
THE NEW YORK POST REVIEW:
"The musical puppet-and-people show “Avenue Q” (at the Golden) has so much to recommend it—an exceptionally gifted cast, a strong book by Jeff Whitty, with equally strong music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and the splendid direction of Jason Moore—that to focus on the highs in the production is rather like begging at a banquet when one’s plate and cup are full to overflowing."
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
THE NEW YORKER REVIEW:
"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."
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
AMNY REVIEW:
"It is an elegant production that shines with authentic emotions, but also a snooze fest that may leave you facing a 90-minute nap. It's so studied and contemplative that it turns dull and labored, chilling its sentimental plot below the freezing point. Couldn't its creative team have given us just a spoonful of sugar to help the gritty naturalism and stark minimalism go down?"
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
THEATERMANIA REVIEW:
"Even audience members familiar with the tuner's provenance may think that this 90-minute chamber musical would fare better in a smaller auditorium instead of falling too timidly over the lip of the stage in this 900-plus-seat house. Moreover, with a score that too rarely feels as if it rises from random recitative to heighten-the-moment song, many spectators may easily conclude the whole enterprise would be less flat as a straight play. Modesty and minimalism in musicals aren't necessarily virtues."
Click here to read the full A Catered Affair review.
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