A Catered Affair

Went to see this show at the Old Globe last night, yeah it’s Broadway Bound. It’s a Harvey Fierstein project, also staring Faith Prince and Tom Wopat. A beautiful message and a lovely little tale, lots of emotion but most of it on the dark side. Lovely melodies and sweet orchestrations, the show was very easy on the ear. But it felt like the whole of the show could be condensed and made into the first scene of act two in a bigger musical. There was not a single uptempo song. This isn’t the first project at this scale that I’ve said this about and I just can’t understand it. How can you get this far into the production of a show and NOT have some musical director or arranger or SOMEone say, hey wait a minute – we’ve got nothing but ballads in this show.

It was screaming for some comic relief, gimme a subplot with some fun. Harvey’s character always injected some much needed energy into his scenes, and he kept referring to his other gay friends and I was just dying to see some of them on stage with some patter songs and some funny repartee. Nope. Just more ballads.

I have to lay some of the blame at the directors’ feet. The show felt like a tragedy, even though it ends on an upper the show is almost all angst, crisis and confrontation. Most of the acting was played down too. And there were these huge pauses. Pauses for dramatic effect. Huge long pauses. Enormously long extended . . .well you get the picture. The actors were good enough to make them work, but as a dramatic choice, I think John Doyle the director was a bit lavish with the silence. I’ve seen his work before with Sweeney Todd in NY and he’s a terrific director, certainly – I just think this piece might not be his best work.

All in all I’m very glad I saw the piece. It was based on an old Betty Davis film (that I’ve not seen) that was written by Gore Vidal. Quite a pedigree. I can’t imagine that this will have any legs on the great white way, but time will tell.