A toast to the subtle approach

When Harvey Fierstein was about 9, his Uncle Irwin coerced him onto the Cyclone, the roller coaster at Coney Island. When the scary ride was over and little Harvey was back on terra firma, his uncle chided: “So you lived through that, right? But you kept your eyes closed, and you missed the whole thing.”

“I never forgot that lesson,” recalls Fierstein in his inimitable basso profundo as a car service takes him through the clogged Manhattan streets to a shoe fitting at T.O. Dey, Broadway’s premier shoemaker. Decades later, he has used this seminal event as a central metaphor in “A Catered Affair,” the new Broadway-bound musical that has him wearing two pairs of shoes and three hats: as featured performer, librettist and one of the lead producers. “It seemed to me that these people are faced with the same thing: They’re in relationships with their eyes closed and you want to say, ‘You’re halfway through the ride, you can’t afford to wait until the scary feeling ends. Open your eyes!’ ”

“These people” are the Hurleys, a working-class Irish Catholic Bronx family who must decide whether to spend their life savings on a new cab for Dad or blow it on an extravagant wedding for their daughter. The characters and their dilemma were created by the late Paddy Chayefsky in a 1955 teleplay, “The Wedding Breakfast.” A year later, Gore Vidal adapted the story for a Richard Brooks film, “The Catered Affair,” starring Ernest Borgnine and Bette Davis. Now Fierstein has adapted it to the musical stage, choosing newcomer John Bucchino to supply songs and Tony-winning director John Doyle (“Sweeney Todd”) to fashion it into an intimate chamber piece.

Given its oilcloth themes -- “musical theater meets Clifford Odets,” according to Doyle -- the $6.5-million, 10-character show seems one of the more anomalous offerings in a season dominated by behemoths such as “Young Frankenstein” and “The Little Mermaid” and such satiric larks as “Xanadu.” Indeed, in the course of following the show from the first day of rehearsals in New York to the first paid preview of its out-of-town tryout at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, one finds that Fierstein’s roller-coaster metaphor seems as apt for the cast and creative team as it is for his characters.

“It’s the most emotionally exhausting role I’ve ever done -- and I’ve done a few,” says Tony winner Faith Prince, who stars as Agnes Hurley, the repressed housewife who hopes that her daughter will find the marital bliss that has eluded her.

“It’s horrifyingly scary, delicate and complex. I’m not sure if I’ll ever ‘get’ it,” says Leslie Kritzer, the 30-year-old actress who, after stealing notices in a minor role in last season’s “Legally Blonde,” plays daughter Janey.

“It could fall flat on its face or be something that people will remember forever,” Doyle says. “That’s what’s so great about the theater: the unknown.”

Subject matter suits him

If anybody knows his way around the theater, it’s Fierstein. After three decades and four Tony Awards, the actor-writer has been rethinking family relationships since his 1982 Tony-winning “Torch Song Trilogy,” followed by “La Cage aux Folles.” “Harvey’s strength has always been to mine both the heartbreaking and humorous in life in the most unconventional ways,” says lead producer Jordan Roth. “This was totally the right fit for him.” Not that “A Catered Affair” seemed destined to join the seemingly endless film-to-musical trend. The relatively obscure 1956 feature was dismissed at the time by critics. The New York Times panned it as “a low-income playback of the old keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, thin in subject matter and scant in its probe of character.”

“I didn’t think the film went far enough with the fears of the characters,” says Fierstein, while bantering good-naturedly with Gino Bufulco of T.O. Dey as he slips on a pair of size 10 1/2 EEE loafers. Fierstein has raised the stakes by bringing to the forefront the death of a favored son, a casualty of the Korean War, and making Agnes more resentful of the circumstances of her marriage. Fierstein has also written in the role of gay Uncle Winston, sleeping on the Hurleys’ living room couch after splitting with his “roommate,” Keith, and adding a distinctly contemporary spin. In Fierstein’s version, Agnes and his character, Winston, discover the complexities of love and commitment through their respective relationships.

“The issues are this big,” says Fierstein, pressing his thumb and forefinger nearly together. “But Chayefsky also knew how to get his fist around the human heart. So it’s about how you feel about your life -- and nothing’s more important than that.”

Having secured the rights six years ago from Dan Chayefsky, the writer’s son, Fierstein coaxed Bucchino, a pop songwriter mentored by Stephen Schwartz and Stephen Sondheim, to write songs that would seamlessly emerge from the lives of the characters. Armed with a book and songs, Fierstein had just begun to cast around for a director when he attended Doyle’s radically reinvented revival of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” which featured a cast that doubled as the orchestra. “I was a little scared of American directors on this one, that they’d want to turn it into a ‘musical,’ and I was right,” Fierstein says. “All I kept hearing was ‘It’s not big enough.’ ”

No problem there with Doyle who, Fierstein says, keeps asking if it’s spare enough. “He just keeps stripping away to achieve this cinematic, realistic style. He has this ‘box’ in the rehearsal room into which props keep disappearing. He asked me the other day if I wouldn’t mind cutting out a two-word repetition, ‘Angelo, Angelo.’ I said, ‘Why? Because you haven’t put anything in the box today and your life’s not complete? Go away or the show will end up being 25 minutes.’ ”

Mining the depth

It is the first day of rehearsal for “A Catered Affair” -- a gathering of actors, creatives, producers and assorted personnel that has the feel of a college orientation. Doyle makes short remarks to the assemblage, inviting them to study the sketches of costumes and sets, along with vintage sepia-tinted 1950s photographs of brides, cab drivers and working men and women. “You don’t get many pieces of musical theater that are about human beings, and that’s a tragedy,” he says.

Doyle concludes by saying that rehearsals will be intense but not long. “I like to be in bed by 10 o’clock.”

Just before he addressed the company, the 54-year-old director admitted he hadn’t slept much the night before. “It’s horrible,” he complains good-naturedly. “As Peter Hall said, it gets harder and harder to go into the rehearsal room, there’s something terribly exposed about it.”

As he speaks, strains of songs from “Sweeney Todd” emanate from adjoining rooms -- Doyle is concurrently rehearsing the road company of his revival -- and, he notes laughing, in “A Catered Affair,” not one person is schlepping around a trombone. “Mind you, I’ve directed hundreds of productions in England without the cast playing musical instruments. But you get this reputation as a ‘one-trick pony’ or as someone who is trying to revolutionize the theater,” he says. “I’m just drawn to telling the story in whatever best way I can. I like to invite the audience to the campfire to just listen.”

He thinks for a moment and then adds, “Rather sad, that? That we feel we have to invite the audience to listen. . . . I find that deeply concerning.”

Doyle says that by Page 10 of Fierstein’s libretto he was hooked and he agreed to direct the production even before hearing the songs. Because the Hurleys’ story was so compellingly resonant, Doyle knew he had to come up with the right style for it. “How do you make the issue of denial interesting?” he muses. “How do we enable the fluidity that the piece requires? How do I access 1953 themes in a contemporary way? It may be an ‘old-fashioned’ story, but it certainly can’t be in terms of style.”

Finesse and fine-tuning

In a rehearsal a couple of weeks after the orientation, Kritzer’s Janey is telling her parents that she and boyfriend Ralph (Matt Cavenaugh) are getting married and they are insisting on a quick, no-fuss city hall ceremony. As her father wearily sips coffee and her mother makes breakfast, Janey moves from dialogue to a Sondheim-esque recitative of plans -- “Ralph and me are getting married, getting married right away” -- soon to go awry. Doyle takes Kritzer aside. “You know you’re in for a battle when you walk into the kitchen. We’re seeing some kind of Irish temperament,” he tells her. “You hardly give your mother time to speak.” The scene is repeated again and again with Kritzer becoming more emphatic. Prince says to Kritzer, “I was you in my family, you remind me of me at that age.” Doyle intently studies how the actors are handling the props. “OK,” he says, grabbing the creamer and sugar bowl, “these go into the box.” Just before the company breaks for lunch, Doyle gently advises Kritzer to keep her acting “still. . . it will seem less musical comedy that way. It takes the whimsy out of it.”

“It’s not an easy transition from ‘Happy, Happy, Pink Forever!’ to this show,” Kritzer says during a break, referring to her shift from “Legally Blonde” to “A Catered Affair.” “All I wanted to do was cry through the first weeks of rehearsal and you can’t because everybody is so repressed. You have to play opposite the beauty and sweetness of John’s music. John [Doyle] constantly says, ‘Let the music do its job, you do yours.’ ”

When rehearsals resume, the kitchen scene fluidly moves into the bedroom where Agnes has a heart-to-heart, in her own halting way, with her daughter about the challenges of starting out. As Prince sings, it’s clear that the failures of her character’s past are simmering beneath the surface, the unfurling of tablecloth and sheets are her private declarations of surrender. Doyle suggests to Prince that she knows every inch of this apartment. “This is the bedrock of who these people are,” he tells her. The two go over the order of making the bed while she sings. “You never make a bed the same way twice,” he says. Noticing that the actress is fumbling with the coverlet, he says, “Let’s get rid of this.”

For Prince, the leaching of the “musical comedy” out of “A Catered Affair” makes sense. “It has a baseline of humor -- ironic humor -- which is a coping mechanism. When things get bad, people get really funny,” says Prince. “This woman is complex, a survivor. She has a coldness, but there’s a warmth to her at the same time.”

Larger than ‘50s life

Although Agnes Hurley may be poor, she would know how to spend money if she had it, Prince says. “She could pick out Jackie O’s clothes for her.”

Prince has an opportunity to show that side of Agnes when the company gathers to rehearse the scene in which Tom (Tom Wopat), Agnes and Uncle Winston go to the catering hall to make the arrangements for an event that is spiraling out of control. While Tom frets about the cost of feeding “all these strangers,” Agnes and Winston begin to enjoy painting on such an extravagant canvas; in fact, this is one of the few scenes in the musical in which the element of fantasy is written into the script.

When Heather MacRae, as Betty, the catering hall hostess, comes merrily charging in -- “I know a fun family when I see one” -- Doyle takes her aside. “Try to be a little more business-like.” At first, Agnes seems a bit uneasy in dealing with the situation. But as the scene wears on, she grows in confidence. “Faith, whenever you’re speaking to the hostess, cross your legs,” says Doyle, encouraging the ladylike Agnes to come to the fore. When Agnes seems overwhelmed by the choices -- mindful of Tom’s resentful grunts at all the “extras” -- Winston takes over. “My people are good at doing this,” he says to Betty. When she responds, “The Irish?” Fierstein does a flamboyant double take. “Sure, why not?” When he asks her to “toss in” some spring rolls onto the menu and moments later, “to toss in” some halibut, Fierstein stops. Looking at Doyle he says, “Another ‘toss’? What lousy writing! Fire the writer!” “This show,” Wopat says, “is definitely not going to be bleak -- not with Harvey in it.”

Indeed, in Fierstein the play has not only its comic relief but a larger-than-life gay flamboyance that may seem incongruous in a 1950s Irish Catholic Bronx family. He describes himself as “King Kong” when, in a drunken furor over not being invited to the wedding, he crashes Agnes’ dinner party with her future in-laws, the Hallorans. Has Doyle tried to reign him in? “Not at all!” Fierstein says. “In fact, just the opposite.” After a moment, Fierstein reconsiders. “Well, maybe he’s so good that I didn’t even notice.”

“A Catered Affair,” he says, is striving to hit the musical theater trifecta: to be transporting, to be entertaining, to be moving. “And of all of them, the third is the hardest, really hard,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen this particular style applied to this kind of story. It’s really never been tried before.

“Are we the ‘un-cola’ of the season? Maybe,” he muses. “Will we succeed? The audience will let us know.”

Crowd rises to the occasion

As the story fluidly unfolds at the first paid preview at the Old Globe, what is most striking about the audience’s response to the 96 intermission-less minutes is the rapt silence. There are several moments when one can hear a pin drop -- not a cough, not the rustle of a program. The audience has wholeheartedly accepted Doyle’s invitation “to come to the campfire to just listen.”

“The trust in the audience has paid off,” Fierstein says a few days later, adding that his first reaction has been to “exhale a breath that I’ve been holding in for six years. . . . It works. We could feel the audience sucking the words right out of our mouths.”

For Doyle, the audience response thus far signals a willingness not only to take a journey with the Hurleys but also to use their imaginations to fill in the lacunas in his spare production. “The audience comes into that theater not only with their hundred dollars but also with their imaginations -- and it’s something that the theater has ignored,” he says. “It all started with that helicopter [in ‘Miss Saigon’], didn’t it? But there must be an alternative in the marketplace. And it’s kind of ironic that the alternative is simply getting back to what the musical theater used to do all the time. Certainly the hope is that there isn’t anybody in that audience who doesn’t care about Tom and Aggie. If so, then we may as well pack our bags and go home.”

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‘A Catered Affair’

Where: Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, San Diego

When: Opens at 7 tonight. 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 28

Price: $62 to $79

Contact: (619) 234-5623