I
Love My Wife at The Center at Rhinebeck
by
Jay Blotcher
Peter Aaron
When it arrived in 1977, the musical comedy I Love
My Wife seemed a logical conclusion to Broadway’s celebration
of the sexual revolution. Hair had already demonstrated that the
kids were ready to drop their clothes at will. Company mercilessly
examines the lies we tell one another about love, marriage and fidelity
in order to survive. I Love My Wife, however, declared that even
suburban adults were tired of McCarthy-era blue balls and hungry
for kicks. By now, key parties had edged out Michigan Rummy as suburban
entertainment. Plato’s Retreat, the notorious Manhattan club
for swingers, was drawing the bridge and tunnel crowd. The counterculture,
now bedecked in a leisure suit and sporting a toupee, had gone mainstream.
Taking
the stage this month at The Center for the Performing Arts at Rhinebeck,
I Love My Wife is a slice of chaste naughtiness, an unlikely musical
document of this auspicious postscript to the free- love generation.
I
Love My Wife, directed and choreographed by Marcus D. Gregio, concerns
two thirty-something married couples cloistered in Trenton, New
Jersey, who have belatedly felt the sexual seismic vibrations emanating
from Manhattan. Monica and Wally, Alvin and Cleo have been good
chums since high school, but also strangers to the stripe of hedonism
now creeping into their neighborhood. Perhaps, they argue back and
forth, a little wife-swapping is in order. Whacky complications,
as they say, ensue.
“They
want to be in keeping with the times,” said Producer Diana
di Grandi. At first the men feel the ice should be broken with a
ménage a trios. However, the women balk and the only compromise
seems to be a possible foursome...
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