Anniversary Schmalz

I Do! I Do! In its stars, Mary Martin and Robert Preston, this musical is blessed; in its book and score, it is blubber. The show is a two-character, two-gun salute to the enduring joys and passing frustrations of 50 years of married life. "A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a commonwealth," said G. K. Chesterton; in I Do! I Do!, marriage is a half-century diet of cotton candy.

Adapted from the 1951 Broadway hit, The Fourposter, the musical retains the play's central prop, though here the bed is on a turntable and sometimes spins around like a carrousel. As Director Gower Champion realized, every bit of added motion is essential, since the plot is mired in a clicheland where the journey through life is so predictable that it seems exactly like going nowhere. It begins with Wedding-Night Jitters. Yes, the new groom is frightened back into his pants. Morning-After Bliss finds the couple beamish and breaking into a delightful soft-shoe dance in their bare feet. Comes the nine-month dawn, or Counting the Contractions. "This has been going on for millions and millions of years," coos Mary Martin reassuringly. Preston, looking as if he were in protracted labor pains of his own, replies ruefully: "How did the men ever live through it?" And so it goes, from The First Spat to Son's Wild Oats--something involving a bottle of bourbon. Suddenly it is time for daughter to leave the nest, and Fond Father Waxes Wroth: "My daughter is marrying an idiot." Autumn leaves begin dappling the script; Preston and Martin, grey-wigged, pat the familiar bed farewell.

I Do! I Do! is slickly packaged Broadway sentimentality, shrewdly calculated to flatter middleaged, middle-class couples into thinking that their cup is brimming with sunshine and moonglow. The show becomes palatable for two surpassingly good reasons--Mary Martin and Robert Preston. They are charmers of seismic force and theatrical perfectionists to the fraction of a nuance. They complement each other's temperaments. Preston hisses energy. He is as restless and agile as a panther. There is no repose in him, and the world is a woman to be won. Mary Martin exists to be wooed. She focuses light, as a magnifying glass brings the sun to a pinpoint of burning stillness. When she sings, one may imagine that the choir of the seraphim pauses to take rehearsal notes.

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