ON THE RECORD: A Minister's Wife, Plus Reissues of Ernest in Love, The Mad Show and More

By Steven Suskin
18 Sep 2011

Cover art for the Off-Broadway cast album of A Minister's Wife.
Cover art for the Off-Broadway cast album of A Minister's Wife.

Listening to cast recording of A Minister's Wife plus Masterworks Broadway reissues of archy and mehitabel, Say, Darling, Ernest in Love and The Mad Show.

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A Minister's Wife [PS Classics PS-1102]
The opening tracks of the cast recording of Joshua Schmidt and Jan Levy Tranen's A Minister's Wife made me wonder whether I was perhaps too hasty in my judgment when I viewed it at the Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi Newhouse in May. But within ten minutes I determined that no, what I found distracting then remains problematic. Which is to say that this is an interesting work and an intriguing experiment, but one in which the authors choose a path which proves unprofitable.

The problem, it seems, is conceptual. Here, on the page, is Bernard Shaw's 1898 Candida, which has retained interest for more than a century. And here, on the stage, is a musical Candida; not so much adapted for the stage, as Alan Lerner and Fritz Loewe did to Pygmalion 55 years ago, as literally set to music. That is, entire sections of Shaw's dialogue are set to music. Mr. Shaw was himself a critic, and I expect he would offer that his dialogue works better without the addition of rhythmic strictures and musical tones.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would simply dismiss the thing and let it rest. The Off-Broadway annals are full of mild-to-weak classics-set-to-music, a form that was especially prevalent in the early 1960s. But A Minister's Wife comes from Joshua Schmidt, who a few years back applied a similar treatment to another old play and turned it into the fascinating and effective Adding Machine. One cannot, and should not, expect so-called lightning to strike twice.

But Adding Machine was so invigorating that A Minister's Wife — which originated at the Writers' Theatre in Glencoe, IL — arrived with high expectations and an abundance of critical good will. The former paired Elmer Rice's expressionistic play (and expressionistic language) with Schmidt's often abrasively unmelodic music to great effect, giving us a musical unlike any other. The language of Candida, though, is decidedly not abrasive; simplistically, I suppose we could say that Rice's dialogue is staccato, while Shaw needs to be legato. (Schmidt wrote music and shared libretto credit with Jason Loewith for Adding Machine. For A Minister's Wife, he wrote music, to lyrics by Tranen.)

A Minister's Wife is impeccably performed by Marc Kudisch, Kate Fry and Bobby Steggert, assisted by Drew Gehling and Kate Fry; they have a lot of singing to do, and they do it well. They are ably accompanied by a four-piece band — piano, violin, cello and bass clarinet — conducted by Richard Carsey and orchestrated by the composer. But the problem continually intrudes: A Minister's Wife is Shaw set to music, rather than adapted to the musical stage.

 Continued...