TT: Good times, bad times

I took another swing through New England last weekend to catch a pair of shows about marriage that couldn’t be more different, Westport Country Playhouse’s I Do! I Do! and Barrington Stage Company’s Absurd Person Singular. Here’s an excerpt from my review in today’s Wall Street Journal.
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Is marriage a bed of roses–or of nails? Your answer to that question may depend on whether you choose to see Westport Country Playhouse’s sunny revival of “I Do! I Do!” or Barrington Stage Company’s sardonic production of “Absurd Person Singular.” Both shows are formally innovative comedies of marriage that were hugely successful when first produced on Broadway. Beyond that, though, they have next to nothing in common save for being very, very good.
“I Do! I Do!” is a two-character musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, the “Fantasticks” guys, based on “The Fourposter,” Jan de Hartog’s ever-popular 1951 play about a half-century in the life of a successful marriage. The show is close to plotless, with each song offering a snapshot of an archetypical marital situation: the honeymoon, the first child, the first quarrel….
Kate Baldwin, whose performance in last season’s revival of “Finian’s Rainbow” established her as one of Broadway’s musical-comedy queens, is an absolute knockout as the wife of “I Do! I Do!” If Mary Martin was any better than this…well, let’s just say that I don’t see how she could have been. Not only is Ms. Baldwin a charismatic actor, but her concert-quality singing is as good as you’re ever going to hear in a musical….
Alan Ayckbourn, England’s most popular playwright, rang the bell in America in 1974 with “Absurd Person Singular,” which ran for 591 performances on Broadway. Not until last year’s triumphant revival of “The Norman Conquests” did he make anything like the same kind of splash–the Manhattan Theatre Club’s 2005 production was a flop–but Mr. Ayckbourn’s dark farces of marital discord are now being performed with steadily growing frequency both Off Broadway and elsewhere in the U.S. Judging by the rapturous reception of “The Norman Conquests,” I’d say that Broadway is about ready to catch up with the rest of the country.
Meanwhile, Barrington Stage is mounting a strongly acted revival of “Absurd Person Singular,” whose three acts, set on three successive Christmases, show us three couples whose lives are in varied states of disarray. Finnerty Steeves, one of this country’s top regional-theater actors, is nothing short of extraordinary as the desperately unhappy Eva, who tries without success to kill herself seven times in a row in the second act. That these repeated attempts should be as hysterically funny as they are grimly serious says everything about the complexity of Mr. Ayckbourn’s style of comedy….
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Read the whole thing here.
Mary Martin and Robert Preston perform “Nobody’s Perfect” (from I Do! I Do!) on the 1966 Tony Awards telecast: