May 3–10, 2001

theater

I Still Do!

I Do! I Do!

Through June 24, Studio 3 at the Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut Street, 215-574-3550.

Wedded bliss: Whelan and Schiff.

Thirty-three years ago, I saw the original production of I Do! I Do! and fell in love — both with the two-character musical and with its principal performers, Mary Martin and Robert Preston. They taught me my first lessons in the luminous power of star quality.

Fair warning: I was 11. And even then, I recognized that this little show, which recounts 50 years of marriage, was a tad sentimental. Would I Do! I Do! still work?

Certainly the sentimentality remains. Even for a period piece (it begins just after 1900), the attitudes are quaint: there’s a song about whether newlyweds Agnes and Michael have ever seen an undressed member of the opposite sex. I Do! I Do! is an uneven mix of treacle and pith. Tom Jones’ book and lyrics and Harvey Schmidt’s music occasionally tiptoe into the darker territory of marital unpleasantness but quickly retreat to sunnier places.

Still, the piece works. Those familiar with Jones and Schmidt’s more famous musical, The Fantasticks, will know the team’s skill at creating small, quirky songs of genuine wit and charm, and they do it again here. Most of all, we’re delighted by the delicate scale of the piece — it’s so cozily intimate.

Intimate is certainly the word here. Many suburban homes have bigger bathrooms than the stage at Walnut Studio. Sometimes the actors seem physically constrained, and with no distance from the audience it’s much harder to create the illusion that the characters begin young and end old.

But Denise Whelan (Agnes) and Dan Schiff (Michael) rise to the occasion, even if there are colors in both roles that here are merely sketched in. Mary Martin made something utterly heartbreaking of Agnes’ twilight years. Whelan doesn’t quite do that, but she’s a likeable performer with a lovely voice. Schiff’s singing is spottier, but he has compensatory charm and a stage veteran’s bottomless bag of tricks.

Perhaps my judgment is clouded by that matinee, 33 years ago, that taught me something about the magic of theater. But it’s not mere sentiment that leads me to find I Do! I Do! a very pleasant evening.

—David Anthony Fox