October 10, 2007 - Confessions Of A New Convert

October 17, 2007

An Empathetic Affair

As a culture, we are at a time of enormous cynicism and lightening fast processing skills.  Yet in the end, there is a cultural empathy that comes around, irrational yet necessary to allow us to avoid utter self-loathing, and releases the pressure when it must.

We see it in the national willingness to forgive people whose behaviors are unforgivable when recounted, but in whom we recognize what we see as genuine contrition.  But at the same time, we also see a rising tide of personal absolutism that seems beyond sanity, whether it's a dog adoption agency expecting its animals not only to be well placed, but to be treated forever as though they are adopted children, not pets; or the City of New York deciding that Trans Fats should not be eaten, banning them from restaurant cooking unilaterally; or the MPAA bending to the anti-tobacco lobby that is now causing self-censorship daily in Hollywood.  

What we forget is that allowing self-censorship to pass without notice is the most significant step towards active government censorship you can take.  But dogs are abused, Americans are too fat, and cigarettes are really bad for you ... and unless we are being directly affected by those acts of censorship, it is easier to just let them go.  (A raft of young celebrities are learning that the Forgive Me game doesn't work so well if you are back on the internet clad in boy, bikinis, booze, and coke a week after rehab ... but that's another column for a different writer ... )

All of this observation is the long way around to observe about myself how confronted with the first theatrical show I have seen "out of town" and feel an undeniable urge to say, "It's going to be a car wreck if they go to Broadway," my sympathetic feelings are turning me inside out.  And it's not because I am shy about not liking something.  Anyone whose read me for a while knows that.  Likewise, anyone who knows my work would know that I am willing to tear down films by people whose work I most admire and that I do not tear down work because I personally dislike someone.

But there is a difference between theater and film that strikes me as similar to the difference between people you know and people you see on TV or the big screen.  It's not that I know anyone in or around A Catered Affair, the new Harvey Fierstein show that is out-of-towning in San Diego.  I am far more likely to run into someone involved with a movie I have shredded and whom I know in a restaurant in L.A. But the size and scale of a show like this ... writing about it as it is mid-process ... even though my comments may make no impact whatsoever ... it feels a bit horrible.  I guess the movie equivalent would be a critic looking at a first cut of a movie, magically, mid-production and walking on set to tell the director that they are not very good, in spite of prior excellence, and that they should save a fortune by stopping the film before its done, no one is going to want to pay to see it.

Ewwww.

On the other hand, is it really cruel for me to suggest that the seemingly inevitable loss of millions more dollars on a show that is simply missing the mark in a meaningful way is a bad idea? 

And as a journalist, how should I feel about the Michael Riedel model of, "the theater queen gossips hate it, so it will be a disaster" with bullets shot from any angle at any time aimed with all the purpose of all gossip?

In the case of A Catered Affair, panning the show is unusually painful since the performances are all quite good, the production is mostly clever, and the intent of the work is worthy.  Unfortunately, the score is completely unmemorable, the lyrics thrown off like highly designed but uninteresting architecture, and the story structure unmerciful.

If you are worried about story SPOILERS, now might be the time to exit ...

And ...

The show is about a Lower East Side family that has just lost a son in the War.  They are due a war benefit check that represents the largest single chunk of money they have ever had.   The daughter, for her own reasons, decides to marry.  In fact, she wants to marry fast - on the court steps then use an opportunity to drive someone else's car cross country as a honeymoon.  But vanity and the chance to have a joyous celebration after the loss of a loved one gets the best of everyone and plans are made for "a catered affair," which means that instead of the check going towards securing the family's financial future, it will be spent on "buying dinner for a bunch of strangers,' as the pater familias keeps saying.

The melancholic, but happy ending is that they don't have the big wedding that the daughter didn't really want in the first place and come to what peace a parent can with the loss of a child. 

Well ... if you feel that one paragraph of description seemed to set up a lot and the second was all too spare, then you understand the core structural problem with A Catered Affair.

It is one of the most difficult challenges in drama (in any media) to pull off a story where the central focus that drives the story never occurs.  In this case, it is the wedding. 

There is plenty of evidence that director John Doyle, best known for his minimalist musical revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company, knew this going in.  He manages to include a bridal gown reveal moment that is the first sign that the wedding may never happen ... because you can feel in your bones that the moment is meant for the big wedding sequence. 

The show, which runs just over 90 minutes, is like The Producers without "Springtime for Hitler," Wicked without "The Wizard of Oz," or Hairspray without the dance-off.  Audiences can feel them coming and want them and not giving it to them is interesting in a straight drama and disaster in a Broadway musical ... unless the work is of singular genius, which this one is not.

The primary cast of Faith Prince, Tom Wopat, Harvey Fierstein, Leslie Kritzer and Matt Cavenaugh are all excellent.  The one problem I have - and it's not their fault - is that the show seems awfully reluctant to pick an ethnicity ... and if it is multi-cultural, then that would be an issue in that era.  Are they Jews or Irish?  I still don't know.  Wopat is a great singer and does a nice job with his work here, but he looks like he wandered in from another family.  Prince is always excellent.  And Kritzer is a find. Fierstein, as always, steals the show ... he is just someone you want to watch on a stage for hours.

It also helps Harvey that he gets the keynote song in the show, which again, points out one of the problems with the show.  There are only three songs, words and music by John Bucchino, that have any real style separating them from the main musical theme, plus lyrics.  Fierstein has two of them and Wopat has one.  The result is that you feel as though you are listening to warmed over The Light In The Piazza, which is similar in many ways, but infinitely more complex and passionate. 

Complaints I have heard about Fierstein's character in the show - The Gay Uncle - are not much of an issue for me.  There were obviously gay men back then and I'm sure many of them were out to their families.  If there is any problem, it is that you would never know this character was gay if it weren't for him talking about it all of the time.  I guess that's realistic too.  (And clearly, Fierstein screams his sexuality in most settings ... but he also plays straight-but-too-too-straight just fine also.) 

I'm not sure that just adding a big fantasy wedding sequence would save this show.  It would certainly improve it.  20 minutes of a crazy, chaotic, hyper-real wedding would be a glorious respite from the period soap opera of it all and give the audience what it wants.  And, I suspect, that it would make the choice not to have the wedding that much more profound in the end, presuming the fantasy was a happy one ... the obvious touch being that the dead son shows up unannounced, allowing the mother to "talk to him" and work out her pain a little, before the fantasy ended and real life became front and center again.

Heck ... now that I wrote it down, maybe that would save the show.

But it's the score, which just isn't special - though Fierstein's coda number, "Coney Island" will be a recorded separately and be a Best of Broadway favorite - and a focus, as offered in the title, that never happens.  Bittersweet can be brilliant.  But it can also be a rug pulled out from under an audience.

The horror, of course, is that the sheer energy of crap like Legally Blonde and a single thematic song - in that case "Oh My God" - can drive a show to a lot of audience for a long time.  And something much more ambitious and thoughtful, like A Catered Affair, will have a hard time seeing Week 8, if they are ever reckless enough to open this on Broadway.

The thing is, from the perspective of the show producers, they see Middle America in San Diego every night rising to their feet and applauding, so what are they to assume?  The lack of restraint by audiences is frustrating as someone who wants to feel that rising to my feet for a performance means something profound and is appropriately special to the actor(s) and director and writers.  Some would say driven to nightly standing ovations for every show because they paid so much that they need to prove the money was earned.  Perhaps audiences are simply empathetic to the actors who do such a great job up there, even if they don't much like the show.  Either way, how do producers on the road judge what they really have when the audience response is either walkouts or overenthusiasm? 

How do any of us know what's real anymore?

E ME

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