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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Good times, bad times

August 20, 2010 by Terry Teachout

I took another swing through New England last weekend to catch a pair of shows about marriage that couldn’t be more different, Westport Country Playhouse’s I Do! I Do! and Barrington Stage Company’s Absurd Person Singular. Here’s an excerpt from my review in today’s Wall Street Journal.
* * *
Is marriage a bed of roses–or of nails? Your answer to that question may depend on whether you choose to see Westport Country Playhouse’s sunny revival of “I Do! I Do!” or Barrington Stage Company’s sardonic production of “Absurd Person Singular.” Both shows are formally innovative comedies of marriage that were hugely successful when first produced on Broadway. Beyond that, though, they have next to nothing in common save for being very, very good.
“I Do! I Do!” is a two-character musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, the “Fantasticks” guys, based on “The Fourposter,” Jan de Hartog’s ever-popular 1951 play about a half-century in the life of a successful marriage. The show is close to plotless, with each song offering a snapshot of an archetypical marital situation: the honeymoon, the first child, the first quarrel….
Kate Baldwin, whose performance in last season’s revival of “Finian’s Rainbow” established her as one of Broadway’s musical-comedy queens, is an absolute knockout as the wife of “I Do! I Do!” If Mary Martin was any better than this…well, let’s just say that I don’t see how she could have been. Not only is Ms. Baldwin a charismatic actor, but her concert-quality singing is as good as you’re ever going to hear in a musical….
AbsurdPersonBSC10KSPRA_307.sized.jpgAlan Ayckbourn, England’s most popular playwright, rang the bell in America in 1974 with “Absurd Person Singular,” which ran for 591 performances on Broadway. Not until last year’s triumphant revival of “The Norman Conquests” did he make anything like the same kind of splash–the Manhattan Theatre Club’s 2005 production was a flop–but Mr. Ayckbourn’s dark farces of marital discord are now being performed with steadily growing frequency both Off Broadway and elsewhere in the U.S. Judging by the rapturous reception of “The Norman Conquests,” I’d say that Broadway is about ready to catch up with the rest of the country.
Meanwhile, Barrington Stage is mounting a strongly acted revival of “Absurd Person Singular,” whose three acts, set on three successive Christmases, show us three couples whose lives are in varied states of disarray. Finnerty Steeves, one of this country’s top regional-theater actors, is nothing short of extraordinary as the desperately unhappy Eva, who tries without success to kill herself seven times in a row in the second act. That these repeated attempts should be as hysterically funny as they are grimly serious says everything about the complexity of Mr. Ayckbourn’s style of comedy….
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Read the whole thing here.
Mary Martin and Robert Preston perform “Nobody’s Perfect” (from I Do! I Do!) on the 1966 Tony Awards telecast:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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