A CATERED AFFAIR BROADWAY REVIEWS

Show	NY TIMES	NEWSDAY	USA TODAY	VARIETY	DAILY NEWS

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.

Broadway 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.""

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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.""

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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.""

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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.""

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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.""

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NY POST 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.""

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THEATERMANIA REVIEW:

""Anyone familiar with Paddy Chayefsky's 1955 teleplay The Catered Affair -- which was then adapted by Gore Vidal for a 1956 film starring Bette Davis -- will understand what the industrious contingent bringing the musical A Catered Affair to Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre had in mind. Librettist Harvey Fierstein, songwriter John Bucchino, and director John Doyle obviously wanted to recreate the low-key naturalism that was Chayefsky's stock-in-trade during his acclaimed Philco-Goodyear Playhouse days.""

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