A Catered Affair – London Theatre Workshop

Howard Samuels and Maggie Robson in A Catered Affair at the London Theatre Workshop, Fulham

A Catered Affair continues at London Theatre Workshop, Fulham, until 20 June.

Almost a year to the day since the Royal Academy of Music graduates introduced many of us to A Catered Affair comes the professional UK premiere of this thought-provoking piece at the go-ahead London Theatre Workshop.

More a play with music than a musical, it centres on the conflict in a working-class Bronx family when the mother wants to give her neglected daughter the “catered affair” full-works wedding she never had.

Directed with warmth and understanding by Ray Rackham, ably supported by a high-quality cast of nine, the piece is ideally suited to the intimate, 65-seater space above the Eel Brook hostelry in the New Kings Road.

With music and lyrics by John Bucchino and book by Harvey Fierstein, it is based on a Gore Vidal screenplay for a 1956 movie starring Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine and Debbie Reynolds (originally called A Catered Affair but better known here as Wedding Breakfast).

A mainly downbeat piece but laced with mordant wit from the laconic cab-driver father, Tom, and the “confirmed bachelor” eternal lodger uncle, Winston, it ran to mixed reviews for 116 performances on Broadway in 2008, with a lack of good songs chiefly blamed.

I cannot buy that. ‘Our Only Daughter’ is searingly and memorably performed by Maggie Robson as the mother, Aggie, who wants to use the army payment for her killed-in-action son plus most of her husband’s life savings to assuage the guilt she feels for lavishing more love on the boy than on her Janey.

Robson, with a perfect Bronx accent, is bang on the money again with ‘Vision’, a song of regret about how she would have loved to dress up for her own wedding day, and in a terrific duet with Aimee Gray (Janey) in ‘One White Dress’, while the passion Howard Samuels sums up for ‘I Stayed’ in what has become an unemotional, loveless marriage is tear-makingly realistic.

And when Uncle Winston realises that Janey and husband-to-be Ralph (Calum Melville) are planning a “parents only” only quickie ceremony at City Hall instead of the full Monty, David Anthony extracts every bit of venom and humour out of ‘Immediate Family’.

‘Don’t Ever Stop Saying I Love You’ is another good number and the music is in good hands too with David Keefe on piano directing a strong team consisting of Maria Rodriguez (cello), Hannah Laurence (clarinet/flute), Errin McGrath (violin) and Gabor Somfai (viola).

Dudley Rogers, Bryony Growdon, Judith Street and Ellen Verenieks play multiple acting roles in support, with Rogers and Street particularly entertaining as Ralph’s far-better-off parents planning to invite 180 guests of their own before Janey decides to go back to basics in the interests of family harmony and not embarrassing impecunious friends.

But the piece stands or falls on the performances of Robson’s mother and Gray’s daughter (although you have to take it with a pinch of salt when this lovely, sparky, delightful young actress sings the line “plain Jane ordinary girl”) and they totally win us over in a story that gets more involving the longer it goes.

An absorbing evening well worth your attention.

 Jeremy Chapman

www.londontheatreworkshop.co.uk