Red Eye Of Love – off Broadway

The plot of Red Eye Of Love is a gentle love triangle. In real life, too, this show represents a gentle and genteel love story, that of John Wulp whose devotion to the original non-musical production of Red Eye, written by Arnold Weinstein and directed by Wulp, led to their 50-year collaboration musicalizing this sweetly silly play. The result, at the Dicapo Opera Theatre, is the Amas Musical Theatre’s robust and amusing staging of the musical, now with music by Sam Davis and book and lyrics by Weinstein and Wulp. That it took 50 years and several composers to come up with this modest show is true love. Red Eye Of Love immediately brings to mind such campy pastiches as Little Mary Sunshine, The Boy Friend, Curly McDimple and Dames at Sea – all wonderful, but very much of their time, their cultural targets—period movie musicals, operettas, etc.—clearly and affectionately joshed.  What was campy and satirical in the 1960s is virtually meaningless to millennial audiences whose cultural references change at the speed of cyber-communication.