Robert Cuccioli, most familiar to audiences when dressed in the cape and top hat of Jekyll & Hyde, will now don the garb of a guardsman. Beginning May 9, Cuccioli will star in an Off-Broadway production of the Scott Wentworth (book)-Marion Adler (lyrics)-Craig Bohmler (music) musical comedy, Enter the Guardsman. The show, which is a production of the Weissberger Theatre Group, will open in the Dimsom Theatre on E. 15th Street (the Vineyard Theatre space) on May 21. Cuccioli received positive notices when he played in Guardsman at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival last fall. In New York, he will star alongside Mark Jacoby, Derin Altay, Buddy Crutchfield, Kate Dawson, Rusty Ferracane and Marla Schaffel. Wentworth directs.

The tuner won a 1998 Olivier Award for Best New Musical in London and retells Ferenc Molnar's late 19th-century comedy, The Guardsman. The backstage romp concerns a married acting couple who fear that the romance has run cold. The husband impersonates a swashbuckling guardsman, writes love letters to his wife and must eventually meet her in a tryst, in which he hopes she will profess undying love for her husband, instead of the heroic guardsman.

--By Robert Simonson