Dourly but ably adapted by Austin Pendleton from George Bernard Shaw's Candida, with music by Joshua Schmidt, A Minister's Wife is a 90-minutes chamber musical that really shouldn't work. The music verges on decompensating into shimmery-Byzantine shards that are too abstract for the straightforward story: A famed preacher of the Social Gospel (Marc Kudisch) and a dilettante aristocrat (Bobby Steggert) battle for the affections of the title spouse (Kate Fry), who spends most of the show oblivious to their dialectical strutting. Yet Kudisch and Steggert make such strangely compelling enemies I couldn't turn my eyes or ears away.
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