Wilde at Heart: The Quiet Theatrics
of A Man of No Importance
Some musicals don’t announce themselves. They drift in quietly, settle beside you, and before you know it, you’re sitting there, wrecked, wondering when the tears began. That’s the spell cast by A Man of No Importance, now playing at A Noise Within.
Based on the 1994 Albert Finney film, this 2002 off-Broadway musical follows Alfie Byrne, a bus conductor in 1960s Dublin. Alfie finds purpose directing amateur plays with his fellow bus workers. His devotion to Oscar Wilde and his closeted sexuality form the emotional core. This is not just a story about coming out. It is about trying to hold onto something beautiful in a world that insists beauty must be hidden.
Terrence McNally’s book, adapted from Barry Devlin’s original screenplay, is quietly extraordinary. One of the most versatile and humane voices in late 20th-century American theatre, McNally brought to this adaptation the same empathy and structural intelligence that shaped works like Ragtime and Master Class.
David Nevell and Kasey Mahaffy
McNally refines the film’s narrative into something more lyrical without losing its emotional depth. The dialogue is spare, filled with pauses that echo louder than the words themselves. McNally grounds the story in quiet dignity without ever begging for attention.
McNally’s book shows how a story can move from screen to stage with its voice clearer and its heartbeat louder. Rather than restaging the film scene for scene, McNally reimagines the structure to suit the theater’s strengths. Internal monologue becomes externalized through song. Memory becomes stylized staging. The “play within the play” staged by the community theatre, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, becomes not just a device but the story’s nervous system. The adaptation does not lean on nostalgia or cinematic pacing. Instead, it listens to the story’s emotional logic and responds with theatrical language.
Kasey Mahaffy and Ensemble
McNally understands that musical theatre is not just about what characters say or do. It is about what they can only sing. He threads the Wildean subtext deeper into the script, letting it act not merely as character texture but as dramatic architecture. The result doesn’t feel like a film adapted for the stage. It feels original.
The score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens does not chase applause. It stays small. Intimate. No showboating. The songs are small, intimate, and shaped by character. When Alfie sings the title number, it is not a climactic belt. It is quiet and aching. That hush gives it unexpected power.
Flaherty’s melodies avoid easy hooks. They unfold gradually, like fragments of conversation overheard through a closed door. His music in A Man of No Importance hovers near melancholy without plunging in, always suggesting more than it declares.
Kasey Mahaffy, Analisa Idalia,, Ed F. Martin, LeShay Tomlinson Boyce
Flaherty leans on modal shifts, crafting melodies that gently shift between different emotional atmospheres. They brighten momentarily before retreating into shadow, reflecting Alfie’s own oscillation between hope and resignation. The music creates tonal pathways that mirror the character’s emotional journey without announcing these transitions; instead, they arrive as naturally as changing thoughts.
Flaherty also employs asymmetrical phrasing throughout the score. His musical phrases resist predictable patterns and conventional structures. Where traditional songs might follow even four or eight bar sections, his melodies extend beyond where listeners expect them to resolve or suddenly conclude just when we have settled into their rhythm. This creates a sense of beautiful incompleteness in the music, a subtle feeling of something unresolved or waiting. The effect mirrors Alfie’s interrupted life and emotional restraint, turning musical technique into character development without calling attention to itself. You will not hum these tunes on your way home. They do not want to be remembered that way. They linger, more like secrets than songs.
Kasey Mahaffy and Ensemble
Ahrens’s lyrics mirror that subtlety. Every word earns its place. There are no indulgent metaphors or flourishes. Her lines feel like someone trying to speak clearly before the moment escapes them. That quiet urgency suits a story built on everything unsaid, where what is not spoken resounds just as loudly.
Even so, not every song fits this emotional register. “Going Up” and “Art,” both about the world of community theatre, are bright and tuneful. They break briefly from the show’s introspective tone and remind us we are watching a performance. They speak a lighter language, more suited to traditional musical comedy.
Alfie’s reverence for Wilde is not a flourish. It is a strategy. Wilde taught him how to speak through irony, how to dress sorrow in elegance, how to hide in plain sight. Alfie quotes him not for effect, but as ritual. A bid for permission. A prayer.
Kasey Mahaffy and CJ Eldred
The Wildean influence seeps into the show’s rhythm. The score glides rather than erupts. Charm veils pain. Characters perform not just onstage, but in their lives. Artifice, in this world, is not deception. It’s protection. Performance becomes a shelter, a coded language for the unspeakable.
Alfie’s silences feel historic. Wilde’s trial and exile hang behind every pause. Alfie is not punished for what he has done, but for what he is. The musical does not resolve this. It lets him inch toward honesty. When he finally arrives, it is not a breakthrough. It is a long-held breath finally let go. As someone who came out of the closet in 1985, nineteen and bracing against the silence of a conservative Midwestern suburb, I recognize the contours of Alfie’s hidden life with something more than empathy. With a kind of ache, maybe. Recognition without resolution.
David Nevell and Kasey Mahaffy
That ache. That fragile, delayed arrival of self is something Kasey Mahaffy understands instinctively in performance. He plays Alfie with exquisite restraint. He avoids grand gestures. His longing flickers in a pause before speaking, in a glance at a well-worn copy of Wilde’s poetry. His pain lives between the lines. It is a performance of weight and care, although I did occasionally wonder what might surface if the cracks showed more. This is my first time seeing Mahaffy, one of LA’s finest classically trained actors, sing. He has a mellifluous baritone voice with a vocal range that fits the role, warm and unforced.
Mahaffy’s Alfie rarely lets his guard down, even around those closest to him. The person most entangled in his daily life, emotionally and domestically, is his sister, Lily, played by Juliana Sloan with a kind of worn-out strength. The kind you build by holding things together longer than you should have to. She feels tired in the way people do when they have held everything together for too long. The love between her and Alfie is tangled, exasperated, loyal, unspoken. They carry each other without always knowing how.
Kasey Mahaffy and Ensemble
C.J. Eldred lets Robbie Fay, the object of Alfie’s unrequited affection, unfold slowly. He does not perform charisma so much as settle into it, a kind of quiet gravity that makes it easy to see why Alfie would be drawn in. There is a warmth to his presence, a steadiness that does not ask for attention but holds it. Eldred has the Broadway leading man looks and tenor voice that are requisite for the role, but he wears them lightly, never letting polish overpower intimacy.
Analisa Idalia plays Adele, Alfie’s idealized Salome, with a stillness that draws the eye. Her voice carries both youth and weariness, and in her scenes with Alfie, there is the sense of two people carrying invisible burdens they do not yet know how to name.
David Nevell, as Oscar Wilde (who lives in Alfie’s imagination), glides between irony and empathy. He never tries to steal focus. His Wilde hovers, speaking in riddles laced with sadness, the voice of someone who knows the price of being visible. Each of these performances stays close to the heart of the piece, resisting showmanship in favor of truth.
David Nevell and Kasey Mahaffy
Nevell also plays the role of Carney, the conservative churchgoing butcher who serves as the president of the amateur theatrical group where Alfie serves as director. Avoiding caricature, Nevell finds the human fears and beliefs beneath Carney’s bluster. He gives the man enough weight to be a real threat but never reduces him to a villain.
The ensemble in this production hums with quiet precision. Each performer is rooted in the rhythm of daily life but carries just enough spark to suggest why community theater might matter to them. There is no sense of stagey gloss. These are people who feel like they have shared tea breaks, grudges, and decades of shared history. Vocally, they blend with a rough warmth that feels earned, not trained. Whether they speak or simply listen, their presence keeps the world of the play quietly anchored.
That grounded ensemble work is guided by director Julia Rodriguez-Eliott who keeps the staging spare and fluid. Her direction leans into intimacy and vulnerability, gently foregrounding the ensemble not just as a cast but as a communal body—both support system and mirror for Alfie’s inner life. She lets the humor breathe but never lets it dissolve the emotional stakes. She is not afraid of stillness, of faces in quiet crisis, of the sort of pauses that invite an audience in rather than keeping them at arm’s length.
Kasey Mahaffy and Juliana Sloan
Jean-François Coture’s symmetric set reinforces the show’s restraint. A series of arches forms the backbone of the space, conjuring the feel of a church hall while subtly mirroring the theater’s own architecture. With minimal pieces and careful transitions, the design shifts gracefully between settings, inviting the audience to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. His palette uses cyan, magenta, and yellow, a visual nod to Wes Anderson, adding warmth without disrupting the balance of the design. There is humility in the aesthetic. It speaks softly, never begging for notice, yet shaping every moment from the periphery.
Ken Booth’s lighting carries that same lyrical minimalism. His palette is never intrusive. He uses shifts in tone and hue like a breath, emotionally reactive, moment to moment. The light seems to respond to the characters rather than framing them, letting warmth or shadow settle with the scene’s mood. It is a design that listens more than it speaks.
Costumes by Angela Balogh Calin feel lived-in and precisely observed. They reflect the period and setting without tipping into museum-piece accuracy, shaped more by the characters’ lives than by historical display. Every choice, including those made for the ensemble, seems rooted in personality. These are clothes worn by habit, not performance. Wigs are often a weak link in regional productions, but Tony Valdes’s are mostly well-fitted and true to the period.
Kasey Mahaffy and Ensemble
The orchestration in the show, as performed here, is a reduced version based on Bruce Coughlin’s original charts. Even in its scaled-down form, the instrumentation retains a delicate richness. Strings, piano, accordion, and woodwinds weave together with a kind of modest elegance, suggesting the contours of a fuller sound without ever overwhelming the material. There is a folk-like lilt to the orchestration, soft enough to suggest memory, textured enough to carry meaning.
David Nevell and Ensemble
That sense of modest elegance carries into Rod Bagheri’s musical direction which lets the Irish-tinged score breathe. The music suggests pub songs and hymns without sliding into cliché. “The Streets of Dublin” pulses with life but never grandstands. “Love Who You Love” feels like a conversation quietly lifted into melody. These songs stay rooted in the world of the play. They do not ask to be lifted out. The orchestra does not push emotion. It listens. It shadows feeling rather than announcing it, slipping beneath the surface and letting the quiet moments land like breath between thoughts—unforced, unadorned, but undeniable. Sound Designer Jeff Gardner’s amplification kept vocals clear and balanced cleanly with the orchestra except for a few opening night glitches.
The production doesn’t try to plaster over the script’s minor flaws. A few moments tip toward sentiment. A plot turn or two resolves too easily. But none of that breaks the spell. The emotional current holds steady. It remains unforced, unpolished, and somehow all the more moving for it.
When Alfie begins to accept himself, there is no cathartic swell and no sweeping final gesture. Just a quiet shift. A breath let out. A Man of No Importance does not plead for sympathy or offer neat conclusions. It simply invites us to sit beside someone who has finally stopped hiding. Whether that is enough, on stage or off, I cannot say. But it feels like something. And sometimes, something is what keeps us going.
photos by Craig Schwartz
A Man of No Importance
A Noise Within
3352 E Foothill Blvd in Pasadena
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sat & Sun at 2ends on June 1, 2025
for tickets (starting at $51.50 incl. fees), call 626.356.3100 visit A Noise Within
student tickets start at $20
