By David McMichael

Can all of the love, the hurt, the song and dance, the random foolishness and the exquisite moments of a fifty-year marriage be squeezed into the two-and-a-half hour confines of a play? ACU’s fall musical comedy, I Do! I Do!, answers with a strident “yes.”

Carlee Cagle, senior theatre major from Arlington, and Jefferson Ferguson, junior theatre major from Houston, play the two lead characters: husband and wife Michael and Agnes Snow. Throughout the play, the elegant simplicity of the set and the tastefully quiet costuming gives the audience the sense that they are not being performed to – they are being allowed to observe a normal marriage in its natural habitat. Cagle and Ferguson both play to this strength, choosing their actions carefully but performing them in a genuine, unscripted manner.

The exception to this general mood comes when Michael announces that he is in love with another, younger woman. This leads to a dark “Make ’em Laugh” sort of number in which Ferguson is given the room to play wildly inside the walls of his character. Cagle then blows up the stage as a sick-of-it-all matron with high-kicking burlesque tendencies, transforming the downtrodden Agnes into a veritable Roxie Hart.

Check out one of the last three performances of I Do! I Do! on Aug. 26 – 28 in ACU’s Culp Theatre.