Tag: Paddy Chayefsky

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Hollywood and the Three Rs (Romance, Realism, and Wrinkles)

A few months ago, I went to see a Broadway musical based on a television play by Paddy Chayefsky. Confronted with those keywords alone, I pretty much knew that A Catered Affair was not the kind of razzle-dazzler that makes me want to join a chorus line or find myself a chandelier to swing from. A Catered Affair is more Schlitz than champagne, more kitchen sink than swimming pool. Drab, stale, and too-understated-for-a-thousand-seater, it left me colder than yesterday’s toast (and I said as much then).

What made me want to attend the Affair was the chance to see three seasoned performers who, before being thus ill catered to, had been seen at grander and livelier dos: Faith Prince, Tom Wopat, and Harvey Fierstein, whose idea it was to revive and presumably update Chayefsky’s 1955 original. Last night, I caught up with the 1956 movie version as adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal. Similarly drab, but without the cliché-laden lyrics and with a more memorable score by André Previn; and starring Bette Davis, of course.

When we first see Davis’s middle-aged mother on the screen, she is performing her hausfrau chores listening to The Romance of Helen Trent, a radio soap opera that encouraged those tuning in to dream of love in “middle life and even beyond.” It was probably the quickest and most effective way of establishing the character and setting the mood. After all, Davis’s Aggie, whose own marriage is not the stuff of romance, is determined to throw her daughter the wedding that she, Aggie, never had. She is living by proxy, as through Trent’s loves and travails, a fictional character that makes it possible for Aggie to keep on dreaming.

Once again, I was thankful for my many excursions into the world of radio drama; but I also wondered whether the aging Ms. Davis and her far from youthful co-star, Ernest Borgnine, are giving me what Helen Trent promised its listeners back then: an assurance that life goes on past 35 (which, in today’s life expectancy math, translates into, say, 45).

I rarely watch or read anything with or by anyone yet living. It is not that I am morbid—it is because I prefer a certain kind of writing and movie-making. To me, whatever I read, see, or experience is living, insofar as my own mind and brain may be considered alive or capable of giving birth. So, when I followed up our small-screening of The Catered Affair by the requisite dipping into the Internet Movie Database, I was surprised to see that, aside from André Previn, three of its key players are not only alive but still active in show business.

The unsinkable Debbie Reynolds (no surprise there), the Time Machine tested Rod Taylor (next seen as Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), and the indomitable Mr. Borgnine, who has five projects in various stages of production. Not even cats can count on Borgnine lives. To think that, having played a middle-aged working man some five decades ago and still going strong today is both inspiring and . . . exasperating.

Why exasperating? Well, the media contribute to or are responsible for the disappearing act of many an act over the age of, say, fifty (or anyone who looks what we think of as being past middle aged, no matter how far we manage to stretch our earthly existence or Botox our past out of existence these days). You might repeat or even believe the adage that forty is the new thirty, but in Hollywood, sixty is still the same-old ninety. Sure, there are grannios (cameos for the superannuated) and grampaparts in family mush or sitcoms; but few films explore life beyond fifty without rendering maturity all supernatural in a Joan Collins sort of way.

Helen Trent and the heroines of radio were allowed to get old because audiences did not have to look at—or past—the wrinkles and liver spots. High definition, I suspect, is only taking us further down the road of low fidelity, away from the age-old romance that is the reality of life.

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Abiding Faith; or, Where’s the Caterer?

There was a sheet of paper pinned to each seat at the aforementioned Walter Kerr Theatre, asking patrons whether or not they had liked the current production and whether they would recommend the show. Now, I did not hand in my questionnaire. Who am I to caution theatergoers about a musical with such a wonderfully gifted group of players: Harvey Fierstein, who also wrote the libretto, Tom Wopat, whom I had previously seen, defenses way down, in Annie Get Your Gun, and the glorious Faith Prince (last featured here on the cover of the playbill for Bells Are Ringing)? Obviously, enough people had come to the Walter Kerr on that Tuesday evening in early June to relegate me, chancing it by getting a last-minute ticket at TKTS, to a seat way in the back.

Now, this might be all right when the stage is filled with a line of chorus girls making their way down a giant staircase, a set boasting an enormous showboat or an oil painting coming to life (as in the revival of Sunday in the Park with George I would see a few weeks later); but A Catered Affair is not that kind of a razzle-dazzler. It is a modest, earnest musical play; it examines characters rather than providing an opportunity for a series of show tunes. Modesty is its quiet strength, but, sitting in the back row, it still feels an awful lot like weakness.

I regret to report, however belatedly, that I did not warm to A Catered Affair, and not because its thin story felt somewhat warmed up. Sure, it is based on a 1955 television play by Paddy Chayefsky, himself not exactly a hot property these days; but then, most of today’s Broadway offerings are recycled.

A promotional close-up supplied by the theater to passers-by with a view no audience member would enjoy

No, it wasn’t that. I was simply too far removed from the hearth—even further than Uncle Winston, the sidekick Fierstein insisted on turning what, back in the 1950s, could only be an outsider. I appreciated him being there, as a reminder that homosexuals where always in the picture, even when they were kept well outside the frame of the camera. Unfortunately, Winston’s moment in the limelight is “Coney Island,” a dreadfully cliché-laden number in which he advises us to keep our eyes open as we ride the rollercoaster of life.

I had been told about the old stove, and that Ms. Prince actually prepared scrambled eggs during the scene. And that is a recommendation? Well, hand me a frying pan and start selling tickets! It rather reminded me of Gertrude Berg, who insisted on realism, and real eggs, even though The Goldbergs was a radio program. Yes, eggs were being prepared on the stage of the Walter Kerr that night, but, unable to smell the, that did nothing to whet my appetite. An intimate play deserves an intimate theater, especially a play that depends on character far more than on plot, of which there is little, and that anticlimactic.

Indeed, A Catered Affair would have made a fine radio musical, if something like that were ever to be reintroduced into American culture. This is not to say that it is cheap or second-rate. It just means that it does not require visuals for its staging of a family in crisis, a particular brand of problem play you might call Miller Light, even though Rheingold or Schlitz were more likely to be found in the family icebox.

The Walter Kerr was once a radio studio; back in the late 1930s, the playbill informed me, Alexander Woollcott broadcast from here. I would have enjoyed closing my eyes and listening to Ms. Prince, who wowed me many years ago as Adelaide and who keeps delighting me whenever I play selections from the Guys and Dolls cast album. Having kept my eyes peeled on a faraway stage with little to see (not even the event promised in the title), I did not recall a single tune upon exiting the theater shortly before 9 PM, after 90 minutes of intermission-free drabness.

Broadway does Family Tuesdays now, for the discerning “family,” however defined, that can afford to spend money on the less-than-spectacular.