A Minister’s Wife

Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Lincoln Center

New York, (212) 239-6200

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From the cozily diminutive performance space to the scope of the drama, “everything in this new musical seems pocket-size,” said Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press. Despite the addition of about 20 “atmospheric, tantalizing” songs by Adding Machine composer Joshua Schmidt, this adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play Candida has an intimate, Kurt Weill–influenced sensibility. Austin Pendleton’s book trims the story to 90 minutes to focus on the love triangle among the Rev. James Morrell, “a pompous Christian socialist”; Candida, his beautiful wife; and Eugene Marchbanks, the 18-year-old poet who’s smitten with her. The result is “a little jewel of a musical” that, while not destined to be a classic, more than satisfies.

Lamentably, Pendleton has shorn away some of the best assets of Shaw’s original work, said Michael Feingold in The Village Voice. Excised completely is Candida’s nouveau-­riche father, who provided both comic relief and a capitalistic foil to Morrell’s social idealism. Also sadly lacking is a sense of “repressed Victorian sexuality,” which gave Shaw’s drama its juice.

The “moral and intellectual boxing match” between Candida, James, and Eugene may be well mannered, but it’s by no means dull, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. As James Morrell, the widely admired minister, Marc Kudisch “captures both his character’s innate goodness and his egoism.” Bobby Steggert’s Eugene, meanwhile, “radiates outrage and agony in equal measures” as he convincingly challenges the stability of the Morrells’ marriage. As Shaw intended, Kate Fry’s Candida “remains an elusive figure, absent for most of the action.” Yet at the show’s climax, when she “mockingly calls for both men to ‘bid’ for her affections,” she is both forthright and touching. To be sure, this is no My Fair Lady, arguably the most famous adaptation of a Shaw play. But if that show was “a festive banquet at which the champagne never stops flowing, this modestly scaled new musical” is at least “a satisfying afternoon tea.”