There was no entrance applause for Harvey Fierstein at Wednesday’s night’s performance of A Catered Affair. Perhaps the audience didn’t recognize him when he entered not wearing a dress. He always wore one in Hairspray, occasionally donned female clothes in Torch Song Trilogy, and metaphorically stood in for Zaza when he wrote the book of the drag-infused musical La Cage aux Folles. Sure, Fierstein played Tevye not that long ago, but we all knew the show, and were aware that as soon as the lights came up, he’d be out there telling us about “A fiddler on the roof?” and how it sounded crazy, no? But here, as the lights came up on A Catered Affair, this guy in a brown suit and low-slung hat walked slowly onto the stage, and by the time he reached dead center, we finally realized it was he, and by then it was too late to clap for the man who’d be playing Uncle Winston.

For that matter, there wouldn’t be much applause for A Catered Affair through its 90 minutes. But that’s apparently the way bookwriter Fierstein and his songwriter John Bucchino wanted it. Take it from someone who’s seen the lion’s share of musicals on Broadway and beyond for nearly the last half-century: There’s never been a show quite like this. It’s not the most exciting show of all time, but it never tries to be. Instead, its approach is so novel and, in its own strange way, daring that it is certainly is one of Broadway's more fascinating musicals.

No question that Fierstein and Bucchino clearly saw eye-to-eye and soul-to-soul on how to handle the material. I’ve never seen a show where underscoring music comes in so unobtrusively, and then, some moments later, the person who’s been speaking is suddenly singing, and then, after a while, is often suddenly speaking again, and the number is over. Occasionally, there are buttons and breaks for applause, but most of the time, there is simply underpowered singing that somehow yields a power of its own. It must been seen and heard to be believed -- and savored. A Catered Affair may not make much of a cast album because of the quiet nature of the score, but it certainly works (and work wonders) in the theater.

What it is, in short, is a musical version of a Philco Television Playhouse teleplay, which Paddy Chayefsky’s The (sic) Catered Affair indeed was on May 22, 1955. Every effort has been made to keep the quiet nature of the kitchen-sink drama, and its every-day-a-little-death reality. And just like a wedding, there’s something old, something new, something borrowed, and even something blue.

The something new is the way the score unobtrusively comes in and out, and the somethings old and borrowed are, of course, the source material of that teleplay and the Gore Vidal screenplay that came a year later. Aggie and Tom have been married for more than 20 years, and the best that can be said of their union is that they’re used to each other. Their daughter Janey wants to marry Ralph, but doesn’t want a big vulgar spectacle to accompany the union. The kids have a chance to drive out to California in their friends’ car that needs to be delivered. But Aggie feels that her daughter deserves a big wedding, and while taxi-driver Tom needs money to buy a taxi medallion, he gets talked into it. But he doesn’t stay quiet about it, and the fights, large and small, rage on for quite some time.

That it’s a small-scale show is underlined by the scene where Aggie imagines the big wedding. David Gallo’s set doesn’t explode into glory; a little chandelier comes down to represent the opulence she envisions. Funny; Uncle Winston has a line about the need for a Big Wedding that haunts the production: “Resigning oneself to small is sad; requesting it is tragic.”

What’s interesting is that a similar story was told in Bar Mitzvah Boy, the big 1977 London musical that kinda-sorta came to our shores a few years later in a rewritten, minor, out-of-the-way East Side production. There, too, a family was besieged by the responsibilities and expenses of putting on a Big Event that’s supposedly celebratory but was becoming agonizing and costly. (Another coincidence: There the father was a cab driver, too.) But what Bar Mitzvah Boy had that’s of no interest to the writers of A Catered Affair is a e-n-o-r-m-o-u-s and fabulous production number, a jaunty comic march called “The Bar Mitzvah of Elliot Green.” It started with Elliot’s mother singing, “I’m going mad. Made myself ill. I’ve gone from bad to worse, from pill to pill to pill. I’ve worked and worked like a machine for the Bar Mitzvah of Elliot Green” as people with all sorts of samples of hors d’oeuvres and clothes are buzzing about. Get the idea?

Instead, most of the time in A Catered Affair, the singing is quiet and internal. Give credit, though, to both Fierstein and Bucchino for taking small moments in the screenplay and -- for the most part – deepening them. In the film, there are a few casual remarks that the Hurleys had a son Terrence who was killed in Korea. The musicals’ authors have said, wait-a-minute, that wouldn’t be just swept under the rug, and I say they’re right. Though Terrence never appears in this musical, not even in flashback, he is an important honorary character.

But not every change Fierstein made was for the best. In his version, Aggie “had” to marry Tom because she was pregnant. That information comes out later, long after an early scene where Aggie figured out that Janey and Ralph had slept together while she and Tom were away. Aggie makes absolutely nothing of it, and considering that she’s so miserable in her own marriage, she would have reacted long and loudly out of fear that her daughter might make the same mistake she did. But Fierstein sweeps that under the rug.

Something blue? There’s rarely even a naughty word by ‘50s standards in the entire script, but overt talk about homosexuality would have been a blue subject in that decade, so let’s put the show’s most controversial aspect in this category. Since the show’s San Diego debut and throughout the previews, many theatergoers have been startled to see that Feinstein’s character, Uncle Winston, does not remotely hide his homosexuality from his family, friends, or even people he meets for the first time – including the clerks with whom Aggie and Janey deal while purchasing this ‘n’ that for the wedding. Could this have happened in the Eisenhower Era?

Well, there was Quentin Crisp, wasn’t there, who was up-front about his sexuality and himself even in the ‘30s. Yes – but here’s the thing: Crisp lived alone, and that makes his story credible and Winston’s unconvincing. If Winston were that independent a person – and he’s a partner in his own business, too – he wouldn’t be content to spend his nights on his sister and brother-in-law’s sofa, and not just because he’d have to live an ascetic life. Such a guy would want his own place. Can’t he afford it?

Which brings up another problem: Startlingly, Tom has a song where he says, “When your brother needed money for the store, I could have shown him the door, but I loaned him money, then loaned him more, and forgave the debt.” So much has been made of the Hurleys’ precarious financial situation, I can’t see Tom being able to lend Winston money even once, let alone twice -- and then not getting it back. Winston often establishes that he’s paying the wedding bill for the hall and for the guests he invites, so he seems to have enough money. Why would he want Tom to “forgive the debt” under these circumstances? The character Fierstein has created both on paper and on stage would pay him back, and wouldn’t rest until he did.

Unfortunately, Winston’s being gay leads to more problems. In the ‘50s, if a man were asked to take in a gay to live with him and his wife, he would have unequivocally answered, “No (unfortunate word for homosexual) is going to live under my roof.” But let’s say that Tom was one of those rare men to allow it: Then Aggie would have had to be grateful for this then-extraordinary concession, and would have eternally loved her husband for it. She would also have to be grateful for Tom’s loaning Winston the money for jump-starting him in business and not demanding it back. (Frankly, I’d say SHE’d ask for it.) This part of their history never comes up between Aggie and Tom in their “negotiations” about how much or little they love each other. It would.

Ultimately, Fierstein would have done better to have kept Winston (or Jack, as he’s called in the film) straight. He still could have played him; after all, the last time we saw him on Broadway, he was the father of five. But Fierstein might have done the show a favor by not playing the part. He has some demanding songs here, and – no surprise -- he doesn’t sound good in them. His croaking causes a number of Bucchino’s pointed lyrics to get lost.

I was suddenly reminded of Bullets over Broadway, Woody Allen’s terrific film about a young playwright who allows a mobster’s girlfriend – an unspeakably terrible actress – to appear in his play because the thug put up the money. One night, she doesn’t go on, and even the playwright is stunned at how exponentially better the show is without her. I’d like to see A Catered Affair again on a night when Fierstein takes a break and his understudy, the able Mark Zimmerman, comes on to sing the songs. It’s an easy bet to say that they’ll land amazingly better.

There’s another “something new.” Both Fierstein and Bucchino have made their characters occasionally sound anachronistic. When Ralph (the excellent Matt Cavenaugh) warns Janey (the even better Leslie Kritzer) that “Marriage isn’t an escape,” she sure doesn’t sound as if she’s a woman born in the late ‘20s-early ‘30s when she quips, “No. Divorce is. But first things first.” Given that Tom is thinking of becoming “Partners” with another cab-driver, Bucchino should have resisted the urge to make their song echo Ralph and Janey’s thinking of themselves as “partners,” too. Kids in love back then didn’t use that pragmatic term in describing themselves, but opted for the more conventional “husband,” “wife,” or “honey.” Other expressions (“bottom-feeders”), lyrics (“shopping till I drop”), and lines (“Is this about Terrence? How did this get to be about Terrence?”) sound a few decades too early, too.

Faith Prince as Aggie is exceptional, as is Tom Wopat as Tom; each is full of world-weariness. But you know the most interesting thing about the casting? Take a look at Harvey Fierstein’s face. Then do the same with Faith Prince’s. Don’t they appear to be those of a brother and sister?

And while you’re at it, take a look at A Catered Affair. I could feel Wednesday night’s audience really listening. For all its flaws – and good Lord, there are plenty of them – A Catered Affair has its own ability to mesmerize. And when do you get an opportunity to see a John Doyle musical where the cast doesn’t have to play instruments?