By Judith Cookis Rubens
Weddings tend to bring out the worst in families. Everyone has an opinion about the ceremony and party – not just the bride and groom. It can be a tense time that opens up old hurts and long-shuttered desires.
Such is the case for the Hurley family in the musical "A Catered Affair," now at Kalamazoo's Farmers Alley Theatre.
Tom and Aggie Hurley, a working-class family in the '50s Bronx, have recently buried their favored son, a war hero. Now their daughter wants a quickie city hall wedding to her longtime beau. Herself regretful that she never had a big white wedding, mama Aggie worries that her daughter, Janey, isn't starting marriage off right and will be doomed to a loveless union.
When the Hurleys receive a government death benefit check for their son, Aggie plans to give Janey an elaborate wedding send-off. She also wants to right the wrongs for all the years the couple favored Janey's brother. Husband Tom, a hard-working penny pincher, thinks it's foolish to waste such money. The tension only grows.
No, this is not "Father of the Bride" or even "Mamma Mia!" – stories that managed to mine the tender moments and upbeat humor of wedding preparations.
"A Catered Affair" is much darker, almost a newer breed of musical theater, and more grounded in reality. Its tunes are more like a continuation of conversational, honest dialogue, set to music, rather than full-blown show tunes. In a way, the music is more organic, though one could argue the show would be stronger as a straight drama.
In fact, it started out as a 1951 teleplay, and later a Gore Vidal-penned movie starring Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine and Debbie Reynolds. In 2008, actor Harvey Fierstein, together with lyricist/composer John Bucchino, refashioned the script and made it a Broadway musical.
Farmers Alley's well-staged production, co-directed by Barn Theatre veterans Joe Aiello and Scott Burkell (who also star), succeeds in making a grim story deeply moving.
The end product wouldn't work unless we truly connected with these characters, and a first-rate cast fleshes out each person. All are a contradictory mix of selfless and selfish, sympathetic and overbearing.
Anchoring the cast is Broadway actress Barbara Marineau as long-suffering Aggie, a woman who's managed to stifle her desires for years, only to have grief and regret break her open. Marineau gives a commanding performance, unfolding different pieces of Aggie's anger, pride and sadness as they surface. Her songs about the hardships of relationships and marriage ("Married" and "Vision") are haunting, while "Our Only Daughter" will surely have you reaching for your Kleenex.
With such heavy material, Burkell rightly offers some much-needed levity with his portrayal of "bachelor uncle" Winston, whose feelings are hurt when he's not invited to the original wedding. His boozy "Immediate Family" number is a loose-lipped, sarcastic treat that rallies against his family and a judgmental society, which, he feels, prevents him from living openly as a gay man.
For a musical set in the '50s, the undertones of class tensions, economic hardship and closeted sexuality feel very relevant.
Real-life married couple Denene Mulay Koch and Jeremy Koch play the young lovers, Janey and Ralph, caught in the middle of their family's desires. They are somewhat overshadowed by their relatives, but both actors do their musical numbers justice.
As Aggie's stoic husband, Joe Aiello finds an appropriately sharp tongue for Tom. The man is grieving his son's death, bewildered at his wife's dissatisfaction, and angered at the idea of blowing all this money on one party when he's been saving to buy his own taxi cab business for years. The long-married couple's fight and Tom's ensuing solo, "I Stayed," is perhaps one of the angriest theatrical songs out there. It's almost hard to hear such flying arrows of blame. It's one of those arguments that you wonder how two people can ever recover from.
Because of that, the show's resolution feels jammed into an unlikely, too-tidy ending. That, and the opening number (an underwhelming "Partners"), are weak spots.
Overall musical values are high at Farmers Alley, and well-executed here with the help of an eight-person orchestra.
For a musical, however, the music plays a decidedly supporting role. There's just no place for show-stopping dance numbers. If that's what you're looking for, "A Catered Affair" might not be for you.
But if you're willing to tread deeper into the messy dynamics of marriage and family, it would be wise to RSVP "Yes" to this special affair.
REVIEW:
'A Catered Affair'
Farmers Alley Theatre, 221 Farmers Alley, Kalamazoo. Thursday-Sunday through April 17. $29-$33. 269-343-2727. http://www.farmersalleytheatre.com.
