Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty is an old-fashioned guy doing his familial duty and looking for love, and the Huntington Theatre Company has built an old-fashioned musical around him. Whether making a 21st-century musical of the Oscar-winning 1955 film Marty is something intensely worth doing is a matter for debate. But the team of Broadway veterans who’ve done so at the Huntington, doubtless with an eye toward New York, have built a solid, warm-hearted retro entertainment that captures the hangdog charm of the lonely Bronx butcher and his quest for a nice girl who’s more tender than a brisket.

Annie composer Charles Strouse’s score, with passable lyrics by long-time collaborator Lee Adams, ricochets between the dying echoes of the big bands and the first bebop-tinged rumblings of Grease (with more than a whiff of Sondheim). Tony winner Rupert Holmes’s book tells Marty’s simple story of routine workdays and empty Saturday nights, throwing in an Italian street fair and Playboy in its infancy. Robert Jones’s period-evoking set pieces, which trundle on and off as needed, are jazzed up by Mark McCullough’s vivid lighting. Director Mark Brokaw, who won an Obie for How I Learned To Drive, doesn’t fight the essential sweetness of the material. And John C. Reilly is so appealing as the title character — whether serenading an underappreciated girl, a glass case full of meat, or the twinkling star that saw him through World War II — that most women would prefer his beef purveyor to beefcake. (So much for the character’s famous assertion that " whatever it is that women like, I ain’t got it. " As long as what ladies like isn’t grammar, he’s got it.)

Marty began life as a 1953 teleplay starring Rod Steiger as the 34-year-old bachelor butcher who’s " tired of looking. " The love story of two shy, lonely, ordinary people struck such a chord, in the days of Hollywood-studio glamor, that it was subsequently made into the film that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Chayefsky), and Best Actor (Ernest Borgnine); Marty’s Brooklyn-schoolmarm lady love was played by Gene Kelly’s wife, Betsy Blair.

The musical throws in flashier ballroom choreography (by Rob Ashford, the 2002 Tony winner for Thoroughly Modern Millie) for that G-rated meat market, the Stardust Ballroom; it’s realized in the swirl of specks generated by dueling disco balls and accompanied by the jazzy " Why Not You and Me? " , which is sung by trumpet-wielding " Bandleader " Alexander Gemignani. Marty’s quartet of loser buddies, who badger one another with " Whaddya Feel Like Doin’? " , also get some athletic moves in a catchy number called " Saturday Night Girl Reprise, " in which glitteringly hued dream women materialize, swivel their siren calls, and disappear. And there’s a Zorba-like duet, " Niente da Fare, " for Marty’s anxious mom (the full-voiced Barbara Andres) and her " old goat " of a sister, Catherine (a comically grim Marilyn Pasekoff), who feels discarded by her son and daughter-in-law.

There are exuberant performances by Jim Bracchitta, Joey Sorge, Robert Montano, and Matt Ramsey as Marty’s would-be-cocky pals, who flex their fantasies and denigrate Marty’s modest but genuine reality. And Anne Torsiglieri, though too good-looking for a lifetime wallflower, brings a nervous, almost giddy hopefulness to the plain, educated Clara. Along with Andres, she sports the best singing voice as well, with round tone and a light, luscious vibrato.

But the heart of this show is Reilly, who looks a bit like a stretched-out Steiger and whose canon of working-class nice-guy film roles, from The Perfect Storm to The Good Girl, is like an SAT prep course for Marty. A veteran of high-school musicals, he even took voice lessons (and will sing on screen in the upcoming film version of Chicago, in which he plays " Mr. Cellophane " ). If he isn’t Pavarotti, Reilly imbues his songs, as well as his character, with naturalness, and he harmonizes nicely with Torsiglieri. Moreover, his Marty, brow furrowed, his big hands hanging like meat hooks, his whole persona exuding a deliberate if awkward decency, is a mensch worth a dozen Saturday Night guys.