The curtain rises on a magic show. A woman is sawn in half, and a man is suspended in mid-air when his chair disappears. Left alone on stage by the magician, their conversation reveals the pair are married to one another – and have been for the past 157 years.
Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life was a “concept” musical avant la lettre: a time-hopping pageant of vignettes in which, at intervals throughout their eternal marriage, Sam and Susan Cooper renegotiate their relationship in the face of each era’s modern concerns – framed by musical commentary from an assortment of vaudeville acts. “Good economics … awfully bad for love” intones a barbershop quartet before Sam insists on scheduling a potential third child around his business trips. Susan’s foray into first-wave feminism, meanwhile, is heralded by a trio of Shirley Temple-like Tots singing about their mothers’ neuroses.
