Now for me, this sounds like perfect casting if the show were being done at Mr. Burt Reynolds' dinner theater!
I also think Fierstein would have been a disaster in the role. In everything I have seen him in, he not only asks to be loved, he demands it, come hell or high water. I think his insistence on it ruined the book for Catered Affair and his performance threw what could have been a nice, small show totally out of balance. I am a gay man, close enough to Fierstein's age, to have had some of the experiences of invisibility he was trying to address in that show, but it was so anachronistic--for better or for worse (and, I agree, almost always for worse), the uncle would have been expected to bring a female date to the wedding or might have been allowed to bring his "buddy," as long as they didn't insist on being recognized as the "same as" a married heterosexual couple. His anger felt post-Stonewall and simply served Fierstein's contemporary attitudes--which I share, but thought took us out of the period of the show.
He would have insisted on hugging Michael at the end. |
