Is Anyone Seeing THE MINISTERS WIFE Tonight?

I'm not seeing it for a week and I'm DYING to know what your thoughts are!

I just got back from this tonight. I went in with incredibly high hopes and was severely disappointed. The whole thing was a bore from start to finish. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why you would musicalize Candida. Even still, there has to be a better way to do it than this.

The whole thing wanted to be Passion from start to finish, from the structure right down to the score. I feel like it never really got going. At an hour and 45 minutes without intermission, the show was only really engaging for the last 10 minutes or so. The direction was not very good and the acting was amateurish.

Marc Kudisch was fine, but nothing to write home about. The biggest disappointment of the evening for me was Bobby Steggert, whom I usually love. From the moment he first stepped on stage, I thought he was overacting. His whole performance as the poet and romantic seemed incredibly forced. Kate Fry has a lovely voice, but she doesn't bring the sense of independence that is so important for Candida to have. After having seen Melissa Errico's glorious performance in the Irish Rep's production last year, I kept wondering how she would do in the musical version. I thought that Kate didn't command the stage the way she needed to. It never seemed like a contest between James and Eugene. Kate's performance never caused the audience the moment of doubt that it should have. Honestly, Liz Baltes as Prossy and Drew Gehling as Lexy fared the best in their small supporting parts (especially Baltes).

Hopefully they will tighten this up in previews, but as it is right now, it's not very good.

Hey Jordan--
You will like my review much better, because I thought it was lovely. Though as a chamber musical, it wasn't as compelling or original as Adding Machine, it was still worthwhile and I completely disagree with bjh about Bobby Steggert. I enjoyed him in 110, Ragtime and Yank and as far as I'm concerned, he just gets better and better...ran into him recently getting a sandwich at a Subway on 9th Avenue--apparently it was a day before his 30th birthday--and told him as much, and he was very gracious. I didn't feel he was over-acting here; his character is reckless and passionate and it played just fine for me.

Chamber musicals aren't for everybody, are they? An older man next to me was sleeping; and a couple of people in the lobby were complaining about the songs not being catchy enough or the characters not realistic enough...but jeez, people, this isn't what they're setting out to do here! Or at least that's what I felt like saying to them.

But hey, what do I know? I actually kind of liked House of Blue Leaves, too!

I confess up front that I've never been much taken with "Candida," finding it talky and dull. Actresses love doing it, though, and so it gets performed regularly. I've found myself bored each time.

Now we have a musical version, and it too, I'm afraid, is fairly dull. But Austin Pendleton did a good job of condensng it, so it's less of a haul. There are a few effective moments, as well as a couple of laughs. The show cries out for some lyrical ballads that the composer stubbornly fails to provide. Still, there were two songs that fell pleasantly on the ears (song titles not listed, why do they do this?) and the orchestrations were quite pretty.


The cast did a good job. I very much liked Kate Fry, who's lovely, gracious, and winning. It's easy to see why one would fall in love with her. I felt Mark Kudisch made the part less pompous than usual, and that's to the good. Bobby Steggart seems to have cornered the market on lovesick puppy dog parts, and he knows how to play them. I thought Liz Bates and Drew Gehling were both excellent.

The set and costumes were attractive.

I was not bowled over by this show, but I found it a welcome respite from the spate of filthy language and personae running rampant on our stages as if a sewer had exploded on Broadway (Mormon, Motherf...., Jerusalem.) It was
nice to be among genteel people in a nice setting whose converstaion was neither degraded nor degrading. Hard to believe that there was a time when that was the norm.

Updated On: 4/11/11 at 08:49 PM

You're welcome April. I too loved Mormon.

That's the beauty of art. We all have different tastes and there's plenty of opportunity for us to find the pieces that speak to us. I love Shaw and I think Candida is a masterpiece so I loved seeing it turned into what was for me, an intelligent and adult musical. I'm going to try and get back to see it again in fact. I hope there's a recording.

"Chamber musicals aren't for everybody, are they? An older man next to me was sleeping; and a couple of people in the lobby were complaining about the songs not being catchy enough or the characters not realistic enough...but jeez, people, this isn't what they're setting out to do here! Or at least that's what I felt like saying to them."

But if a tree falls in the forest and an audience doesn't care, it means that what 'they're setting out to do' is not working: the artist(s) did not convey whatever he was trying to say in a format that a large group of people might find involving.