“A Catered Affair” is a Broadway musical created by, for, and about grown-ups. This alone puts it in somewhat rare company these days, coming near the end of a theater season that has already featured a mermaid in roller skates, a disco-creating goddess in roller skates, and not one but two tap-dancing green beasties (Frankenstein’s monster and the Grinch).

Composer-lyricist John Bucchino, book-writer Harvey Fierstein (who has written a ripe supporting role for himself), and director John Doyle have courageously bucked this trend toward infantilism by honoring the downbeat tone of its source material — a 1955 Paddy Chayefsky teleplay, adapted the following year for Hollywood by Gore Vidal, about working-class mugs doing everything they can to stay afloat while keeping their dignity. Adult themes, glitz-free settings, an ensemble that appears to have been cast for verisimilitude rather than melismatic bravado: This is exactly what Broadway needs more of, right?

Right?

In theory, yes. But while the weathered Bronx family at the show’s center grapples with whether to use a windfall responsibly or for the sake of appearances, “A Catered Affair” harbors few such concerns. It wears its virtues on its threadbare sleeve, and the vaguely medicinal taste goes a long way toward negating Mr. Fierstein’s terse, insightful libretto and a pair of emotionally stripped-down performances by, as the pressured daughter and regret-steeped mother, Leslie Kritzer and an atypically somber Faith Prince. The show’s missteps are understandable and often heartening in their own right, but they are missteps nonetheless.

As in the previous versions, Aggie and Tom Hurley (Ms. Prince and Tom Wopat) face a bruising decision when their daughter, Janey (Ms. Kritzer), announces her engagement to the relatively affluent Ralph Halloran (Matt Cavenaugh). The young couple has announced its preference for a quick and easy City Hall reception, in part for logistical reasons and in part to forestall any friction between the two families. Tom, who has been saving up to buy his own taxi license, is happy to forego “all the fuss and feathers” involved, but Aggie immediately projects her own marital discontents on Janey, nudging her and the rest of the family into a lavish — and potentially ruinous — wedding.

Mr. Fierstein has made two crucial changes to the script. The first involves Aggie’s brother Jack, a doddering old drunkard and a barely welcome boarder. Well, Jack is no longer doddering, old, drunk, or even Jack. Instead, Uncle Winston is now a “confirmed bachelor” — as in a closeted homosexual — with a formidable waistline and an even more daunting bullfrog voice. In other words, he is played by Harvey Fierstein. The other modification is the absence of the Hurleys’s son, who, instead of preparing to join the Army, as he was in the original script, has already been drafted — and killed — in Korea. (If the son is gone, though, why is Winston still sleeping on the living-room sofa?) The money for either the cab or the wedding will come from the government’s bereavement check, casting an additional shadow of parental guilt over the decision. The prospect of Mr. Fierstein in an ostensibly supporting role, especially one written by the actor himself, is a worrisome one. But Mr. Fierstein has provided himself with just enough twinkle to enliven the proceedings whenever they come close to bogging down. (To be fair, the bar was set fairly low in terms of scenery-chewing after Barry Fitzgerald’s insufferable leprechaun bit in 1956.) If Winston’s wink-wink acknowledgements of his status seem mildly anachronistic, Mr. Fierstein packs a satisfying amount of context into his snug libretto, as when a snooty bridal-shop employee articulates in just a few words the era’s sexual panic:

“Brides don’t breathe. Not if they want a waistline. And you know what they say about brides without waistlines.”

Unfortunately, this facility with language often eludes Mr. Bucchino, a noted cabaret composer making his Broadway debut. His flitting score often settles into ping-ponging vocal snippets and harmonic arpeggios evocative of Stephen Sondheim (a similarity no doubt exacerbated by the show’s orchestrator, the frequent Sondheim collaborator Jonathan Tunick), but he has established a plaintive melodic simplicity that is very much his own while remaining faithful to the 1950s period. The lyrics plod, however, even when the score dances: When a couplet starts with the phrase “taught her,” it’s a safe bet that “daughter” will follow.

While Mr. Doyle has abandoned the actor-musician concept that earned him considerable attention for the recent Sondheim revivals of “Sweeney Todd” and “Company,” his patented minimalist staging remains. David Gallo’s set is confined largely to an array of Bronx apartment windows and fire escapes, plus the occasional stick of furniture, and this “Affair” is notably no-frills at 90 intermissionless minutes. And, as befits a family living in close quarters, even the most lush songs are more likely to end with an interruption — or, in one striking case, total silence — than with an applause-triggering musical cue.

But this admirably spartan staging ultimately feels like as much of a contrivance as the standard bells-and-whistles approach, with several key characters slighted along the way. Tom fares the worst; Mr. Wopat is forced to do a play’s worth of acting in an ill-conceived 11th-hour mea culpa called “I Stayed.” Mr. Cavenaugh is left similarly stranded, albeit in a less complicated role.

Luckily, the women gladly pick up some of the slack. Ms. Kritzer deftly conveys the prickliness but also the susceptibility that comes with having an overbearing mother. As Janey warms to the idea of a lavish wedding despite herself, it’s hard not to share her ambivalence. With her emphatic alto and off-kilter timing, in fact, Ms. Kritzer could very plausibly be the daughter of the Faith Prince who razzle-dazzled audiences in the 1990s with old-school revivals such as “Guys and Dolls” and “Little Me.” That brash and bawdy actress is gone, though, in light of a newly chastened, even demoralized new role. It is hard to imagine a less Prince-ly Hollywood actress than Bette Davis, who played Aggie in the film (Thelma Ritter from the 1955 teleplay makes far more sense), but Ms. Prince adopts Aggie’s weathered melancholy with an absolute minimum of audience-pleasing shortcuts. The restraint can seem willful at times, but a pair of moments in “Affair” — both wordless, one quite loud and the other completely silent — rank among her most nuanced work.

Restraint? Nuanced? Silent? What kind of Broadway musical is this?

One that’s unafraid to confront the idea of disappointment and dashed hopes — and, unfortunately but perhaps fittingly, one that ultimately snuffs out its own promise.

Open run (219 W. 48th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).