Although lyricist/librettist Michael Stewart and composer
Cy Coleman's I Love My Wife was known as the wife-swapping musical, it unsurprisingly came down on the side of monogamy and fidelity by the end, as the husbands sincerely sang the title song ballad. Of course, the topic, along with some other attempts at trendiness in the show, was a bit old-hat by 1977, and that was some measure of how behind the times Broadway and its songwriters and scriptwriters were. Stewart and
Coleman's discussion of drug use, for example, was expressed in "Ev'rybody Today Is Turning On," with the composer coming up with a 1920s jazz arrangement and Stewart putting references to Mary Baker Eddy and
Eddy Duchin in the mouths of what were supposed to be young adult married men of the ‘70s. The small-scale show featured eight performers, including the two couples and four on-stage musicians playing guitar, keyboards, bass, and drums.
Coleman managed to be characteristically eclectic even with such a small ensemble; as a former jazz pianist in nightclubs, he certainly knew his way around the instrumentation. He used it to play pop/rock ("Love Revolution"), country-pop in an
Anne Murray vein ("Someone Wonderful I Missed"), and French chanson à la
Jacques Brel ("Sexually Free"), not to mention an attempt at a sexy Christmas song called "Lovers on Christmas Eve" (sample lyric: "Santa Claus turns me on"). The cast and musicians gamely perform this uneven material on the cast album, but I Love My Wife remains a show that was already embarrassingly dated on opening night. ~ William Ruhlmann