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Until now, there has been one notable musical adaptation of a play by George Bernard Shaw. Actually, My Fair Lady is a lot more than notable—the Pygmalion-inspired tuner is widely considered one of the best musicals ever written. Composer Joshua Schmidt was well aware of this when he was approached to turn Shaw’s Candida—the story of a Victorian Socialist minister’s wife being wooed by a romantic young poet—into a musical. Schmidt won raves for his musical version of Elmer Rice’s Adding Machine, so he was unawed by the challenge of making Shaw sing, but how best to approach a play about three smart people making difficult life choices? The result, A Minister’s Wife, is currently running at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater starring Tony nominees Marc Kudisch and Bobby Steggert and Chicago stage star Kate Fry in the title role. Below, Schmidt explains the development process behind this new show.
Around 2005, Michael Halberstam, artistic director of Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, approached me with an idea for a musical. This project, he said, was to be adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s play Candida.
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