I Do, I Do!
The Akron Beacon Journal - June, 2001
`I Do, I Do' marries humor and emotions
Actors' Summit Duo makes intimate connection with audience
By Connie Bloom
I Do, I Do,the feel-good musical based on Jan de Hartog's Tony award-winning play The Fourposter, is a contradiction of what Broadway musicals are supposed to be, which is first and foremost huge. It features a cast of two. The musical opened on Broadway in 1966, when Mary Martin and Robert Preston enacted a husband and wife whose marriage endures 50 years of triumphs and misadventures, from newlywed bliss to old age. While the cast was small, the score by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt was diverse enough to showcase the considerable talents of the stars. Their roles were so demanding -- the actors sing and dance for more than two hours -- the run had to be kept short. Actors with wobbly stamina would be out of the question.
The Actors' Summit production of the comedic romp hits high notes on all counts. I Do, I Do runs through June 30 in the professional theater company's temporary home in Hudson. Wayne S. Turney and MaryJo Alexander are captivating as Michael and Agnes, who deliver a sumptuous repast of emotions as they navigate the choppy waters of marriage. The action takes place around the carved oak four-poster bed in center stage. His and hers chairs and bureaus are on either side, with the bureaus downstage, a few feet from the audience. It is there the actors retreat to fiddle with their hair and adjust their makeup -- aging to gray-haired senior citizens who are leaving their cavernous home for an apartment in the final scene.
The clever staging keeps the audience intimately connected, swept up in the action from the very first melody. In one scene during her childbearing years, Agnes hangs up the clothesline, children's rompers attached, by thrusting it into the hands of the people in the front row. The story opens in 1900, when the young couple in love -- he a writer of novels -- are about to leave for their church wedding. She is wearing her wedding gown, one of several exquisite costumes with painstaking detail; he dons a top hat and tails. They sing of their memories and fears (All the Dearly Beloved)and rhapsodize over their future (Together Forever) and the meaning of marriage (I Do! I Do!) with powerful emotion. It's not long before life's realities supplant their glee, and Michael, a nervous father-to-be, becomes obsessed with his own labor pains.
When she begins having them, he runs for the doctor, shoving an empty crib next to the four-poster. There are other bumps in the road. At one point, they make a list of each other's irritating habits and engage in a hilarious argument (Nobody's Perfect) with perfectly timed barbs as tempers flare.
Artistic director Neil Thackaberry has delivered a wonderfully paced evening that should not be missed.
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Fifty years ago, I Do! I Do! opened on Broadway in its original form as The Fourposter. Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn played the only two characters in the play. Fifteen years later, in 1966, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt adapted The Fourposter into the musical I Do! I Do! The show opened on Broadway with Mary Martin and Robert Preston singing the roles. Interestingly, that same year, Tandy and Cronyn were acting on Broadway in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, a play that received the Pulitzer Prize.
Now, Actors' Summit offers this love song to marriage in its Hudson theater home. The action of the play starts in 1900 and is set in and around a bed shared by the characters Agnes and Michael. The play opens on their wedding day and ends years later when their children have left the house and they move from that house to a smaller apartment. The story is predictable for the era when it was written, the late 1940s and the early 1950s. For example, on their wedding night, both Agnes and Michael are virgins and, of course, this leads to a number of laughs. Then children arrive, mature, marry and move from the house.
The plot is complicated when Michael develops an attachment to another woman. Although they reconcile, Agnes and Michael have to come to grips with whether they really have loved each other over all of the years. The story is romantic, warm and delicate. Yet, the show may be a bit too candy-coated for some in the audience.
I Do! I Do! has 19 songs, and Agnes and Michael sing most of them as duets. Each gets a solo turn, however. In the song "Nobody's Perfect," each enumerates a list of annoying habits of the other. The reactions from the audience indicated that those annoying habits weren't solely the property of the characters on stage. Several times, wives could be seen poking husbands in the ribs during the description of the more annoying habits.
The only song that achieved popularity beyond the show was "My Cup Runneth Over," which continues to be an American standard.
The cast includes MaryJo Alexander (Agnes) and Wayne Turney (Michael). Each is completely charming in her/his role. Alexander has a pleasant singing voice and seems to enjoy her few turns at dancing. She grows in her role as Agnes. She is her most believable in the final scenes as the mother of the bride, as a woman who wants to leave the home to find herself, and, finally, as an older woman.
Turney, who translated and adapted Oedipus Rex, presented by Actors' Summit earlier this year, brings to the role a youthful excitement. The audience gets to watch him slowly grow old, and this gradual change doesn't leave the audience surprised when Turney becomes a charming curmudgeon by the end of the story. Turney sings well and has an enthusiasm for his dance sequences.
This production might be the perfect wedding party for this summer's brides and grooms. The issues raised in the story could be the basis for discussion on this side of their I do's.
The mature folks in the audience seemed to identify with Agnes and Michael. If you've been married a few years, you might want to take your spouse and see your lives unfold on the stage