Wedding Bell Blues — Porchlight Theatre caters to Fierstein’s musical ‘Affair’

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Harvey Fierstein

‘A CATERED AFFAIR’

♦ Feb. 18-April 1

♦ Porchlight Music Theatre
at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont

♦ Tickets, $38

♦ (773) 327-5252;
porchlightmusictheatre.org

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Musical theater is everywhere in Chicago these days, with the national tours of big Broadway shows often easily outdone by the work at Drury Lane Oakbrook, the Marriott Theatre, Court Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare, Writers’ Theatre and many smaller operations.

For 18 seasons, Porchlight Music Theatre, too, has been a standard bearer for musicals. Since this past June, the company has been under the fresh artistic directorship of veteran actor-director Michael Weber. And if the first show he produced — director Brenda Didier’s searing take on Stephen Sondheim’s “Putting It Together” — is any indication, we are in for a period of high quality work.

Just consider the talent Weber has assembled for Porchlight’s Chicago premiere of “A Catered Affair,” the short-lived 2008 Broadway musical featuring a score by John Bucchino, and a book by Harvey Fierstein based on both the 1956 film by Gore Vidal, and the original 1955 teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky.

Directing the show, which will run Feb. 18-April 1 at Stage 773, is Nick Bowling, who staged the beguiling revival of “Fiorello” at TimeLine Theatre a few seasons back. Doug Peck (whose slew of recent hits includes Court’s “Porgy and Bess,” Writers’ Theatre’s “Oh, Coward!” and the Goodman’s “Candide”) is music director. And the cast includes such top talents as Rebecca Finnegan, Craig Spidle and relative newcomer Kelly Davis Wilson, who played Sandy in American Theatre Company’s “The Original Grease.”

Chayevsky’s story, a quintessential work from the “golden age of television drama” of the 1950s, tells of a long-married Bronx couple, Tom and Aggie Hurley, and the impending marriage of their daughter, Jane, to Ralph Halloran.

Jane and Ralph want a simple wedding. And Tom, who has a one-third-share in a taxi, wants to hold on to the bereavment check received after the death of Jane’s brother in the Korean War so that he can buy out one of his partners. Pressure from extended family and neighbors — plus Aggie’s wish to arrange the sort of wedding she never had — ends up compelling them to plan a lavish reception. Ultimately better impulses prevail.

“I grew up with people like these, only they lived in Brooklyn, and I knew exactly why they were fighting,” said Fierstein, the gravel-voiced, Tony Award-winning actor and playwright who wrote “Torch Song Trilogy,” as well as the book for the musical “La Cage aux Folles.” “My catered affair came in the form of my bar mitzvah, with a reception at Grand Prospect Hall.

“Mostly I wanted to work on this musical because I just don’t see human beings in most of the movies and television I see these days, and death means nothing beyond forensics. I don’t know what anyone is talking about anymore. But in ‘A Catered Affair’ I saw all the emotions I recognized — the whole pattern of living your life with an unbelievable chip on your shoulder for no reason. I saw the miscommunication about love and money — so heartbreaking, because we turn out to be our own worst enemies.

“And then there’s Winston, the bachelor uncle with no life of his own, who lives on his sister Aggie’s couch,” said Fierstein, long a gay activist. “Clearly he’s gay, but in 1953 a man like that couldn’t really have a life of his own. Chayevsky couldn’t have written him as gay, and Gore Vidal wouldn’t have.”

Asked what advice he might have for anyone trying to write the book for a musical, Fierstein said: “I don’t teach. But what I do know is that every story must be told in its own particular way, and you have to be honest in the storytelling. In ‘A Catered Affair,’ for example, there are sometimes three different emotional scenes going on at the same time with the music coming in and out.”

Meanwhile, “Newsies,” Fierstein’s latest musical (with music by Alan Menken and Jack Feldman) begins a Broadway run on March 15. Based on the 1992 film of the same name, it’s the true story of the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899 in New York City.

NOTE: Porchlight also will be teaming up with six Chicago improv and musical mavericks for the premiere of “BEST MUSICAL! A Completely Improvised Musical Comedy,” running Wednesday nights from Feb. 29-March 28 at Stage 773. Conceived by Matthew Loren Cohen and directed by Amanda Blake, the show’s first half is devoted to choosing a “best song” from a grab bag of audience-suggested titles, with the second half showcasing a fully improvised musical including that song.