A Minister’s Wife
Opening Night: May 8, 2011
Closing: June 12, 2011
Theater: Mitzi E. Newhouse
Lincoln Center Theater presents the New York premiere of the new musical A Minister’s Wife, which has been adapted by Austin Pendleton from George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. Conceived and directed by Michael Halberstam, with music by Joshua Schmidt and lyrics by Jan Tranen, the show is based on the 1898 version of Shaw’s play, and explores the fires burning beneath the surface of a seemingly ordinary marriage. The Revered James Morrell and his wife, Candida, are happily married — or at least they think — until a romantic young poet enters their life, turning their world upside-down. The work had its world premiere last spring at Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, where Halberstam is the artistic director. Each day, LCT offers $30 student rush tickets beginning two hours before a performance at the Box Office (subject to availability). Student rush tickets are limited to one ticket per performance and you must show a valid college/university ID to purchase a ticket. Please Note: not all performances have student rush tickets.
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May 8, 2011
Small stirrings of the heart and mind evoke delicate musical responses in “A Minister’s Wife,” the lovingly composed chamber musical that opened on Sunday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. Based on “Candida,” George Bernard Shaw’s comedy about the mysteries of marital love, the musical moves with a gentle step, keeping an intimate focus on its central characters as they circle one another in a cozy London study that becomes the site of a well-mannered moral and intellectual boxing match.
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May 8, 2011
"Pygmalion" excepted, the works of George Bernard Shaw have not translated well to musical theater. The pitfalls of such tinkering can be seen in the transformation of the 1894 comedy "Candida" — about a wise and perceptive minister’s wife in the slums of east London — into "A Minister’s Wife." Hopes that were raised due to the presence of composer Joshua Schmidt, whose 2008 adaptation of Elmer Rice’s obscure "The Adding Machine" was startlingly good, are hereby dashed: Lightning has not struck twice, not this time out anyway. "A Minister’s Wife" is "Candida" with a fair chunk of the Shavian stimulation removed.
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May 9, 2011
Marital fidelity and a woman’s independence take center stage in "A Minister’s Wife," a modest new musical culled from George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play "Candida."
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May 8, 2011
In spite of the enduring success of “My Fair Lady,” the plays of George Bernard Shaw resist being turned into musicals. His words are thrilling enough already and don’t really require the addition of music.
READ THE REVIEWMay 8, 2011
If "My Fair Lady" is George Bernard Shaw writ large, "A Minister’s Wife" is Shaw writ small. Everything about the new musical based on the playwright’s "Candida" seems pocket-sized, from the fragments of songs by Joshua Schmidt to the use of just four musicians to the boiling down of the Shavian story to about 90 minutes without intermission. Even the space where it has landed in New York — Lincoln Center’s the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater — is intimate.
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