I Love My Wife at The Center at Rhinebeck
by Jay Blotcher

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. But this is a show from mainstream showmen Michael Stewart and Cy Coleman, whose contributions to American musical theater include Bye Bye Birdie, Hello, Dolly!, Sweet Charity and Mack & Mabel.

For those ticket holders expecting bisexual co-minglings, the genteel title of the musical should undermine any lascivious notions. Perhaps the show’s message of extramarital coitus interruptus has more in common with our current neoconservative era than we would like to believe.

“If you look at most popular shows like Cabaret—threesomes— and Chicago—murder, infidelity—this subject matter is much more tame,” said di Grandi, whose Up In One Productions has mounted the show.

The libidinous quartet sporting maxi-skirts and polyester shirts includes Cat Messing as Monica, Jeffrey Stults as her husband Wally, Terry Weaver as Alvin and Joy Covert as his wife Cleo.

Known more for staging Shakespeare tragedies and Method actor classics, Gregio (also a scholar of the Bard) is happy to switch gears. “There is nothing about this musical that has any heavy dramatic type of material. It‘s all about laughing and having a good time.”

The show is anything but offensive; it sides with the wallflowers. The nebbishness of the leads and their corny dialogue keeps the situation light. I Love My Wife is a lighthearted crowd pleaser, trafficking in corny wit and resolutely steering clear of the bitter truths that made Company an accurate report from the front in the war between the sexes.

Gregio keeps the action era-appropriate, depicting not only the bad hair, dubious fashions but also the suburban mindset.

“We have to keep the naiveté of that time,” he said. “We have to remember certain aspects of who we are and what we did. We have to put on those clothes again—the polyester. It’s kind of charming really.”

The musical score (music by Coleman, lyrics by Stewart) is a grab bag of divergent styles, hopscotching from Dixieland jazz to soul to country-western to soft rock. Faux-naughty numbers include By Threes,” “Sexually Free,” “Married Couple Seeks Married Couple” and “Ev’rybody Today is Turning On,” a raucously clever cataloguing of recreational drugs. (A surreal and sublime version of this song, duetted by Rock Hudson and Bea Arthur, now appears on YouTube.)

Gregio considers Coleman “a composer who is underrated,” describing his exuberant, razzle-dazzle numbers as “Cole Porter mixed with Randy Newman.”

Clearly the storyline of a sweet-but-square foursome fumbling towards kinkiness resonated for audiences: I Love My Wife, directed by Gene Saks and originally starring James Naughton, Joanna Gleason, Lenny Baker and Ilene Graff, tallied an impressive 857 performances on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
(Perhaps it was ultimately viewed by every tri-state resident similarly intrigued and frightened by the new sexual mores.) The show pulled in four Drama Desk awards and two Antoinette Perry statues: for both director Gene Saks and lead actor Lenny Baker, who found fame that year also starring in Paul Mazursky’s valentine to 1950s Manhattan, Next Stop Greenwich Village.

Up in One Productions was co-founded in 2001 by di Grandi. Any notion that this was another community theater playing it safe was quickly dismissed by their first production: the religious psychodrama Agnes of God. Other highlights include a gender- reversal staging of Richard III, directed by Gregio and reliable
fare like Oklahoma! or Fiddler on the Roof. The not-for-profit, all- volunteer group includes several people who once toiled in the footlights in Manhattan, and at least one person who still does. Scenic designer Richard Prowse has painted backdrops for the Broadway shows Thoroughly Modern Millie and Beauty & the Beast and maintains a studio in Rhinebeck.

“We’re non-equity, but we certainly try to maintain a professional standard,” di Grandi said. “It’s not ‘hey ma, look at me.’” In 2008, expect Up in One to mount the musicals Man of La Mancha and West Side Story and the Neil Simon comedy Chapter Two, all at The Center at Rhinebeck.

Whether you find I Love My Wife deeply charming or mildly annoying, it’s a matter of taste, like wearing a gossamer negligee or a leather harness. Theatre critic Bob Rendell, who reviewed a 2004 revival of the show in Nyack, New York, nailed the nagging dichotomy by observing, “It’s a light, silly story, and it falls somewhere between being a period piece and being just dated.”

Di Grandi has a different evaluation, praising the show “because it is about relationships, love and friendship - and those things don’t change.”

Where does I Love My Wife figure in musical theater history? As good-natured comedy masquerading as social commentary? Or as a cynical attempt to cash in on the last gasp of 60s counterculture? Michael Stewart and Cy Coleman ultimately handle a taboo subject with kid gloves. Their reluctance may have been prescient: Within three years, the era of free love would be eclipsed by Reagan- era conservatism and a huge epidemic with a deceptively small acronym.

I LOVE MY WIFE at The Center for the Performing Arts at Rhinebeck. November 9 through 18. Friday and Saturdays at 8pm (Nov 9, 10, 16, 17) and Sundays at 3pm (Nov 11 and 18). Directed and choreographed by Marcus D. Gregio. Starring Terry Weaver, Joy Covert, Jeffrey Stults, Cat Messing, and co-starring Douglas Liepshutz, Carolyn Peck, Dan Landa and Marcie Steinhour. Tickets $22 adults, $20 seniors and children. Reservations: (845) 876-3080 or http://www.centerforperformingarts.org