Customer Reviews

I sent a letter to my love

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In "I Sent a Letter to My Love," story & score combine to make certain that the two CDs in this package will return many times to your CD player. Melissa Manchester succeeds here in the most difficult of song writing tasks, creating melodies that are at once complex and catchy, and the story they help tell is similarly engaging (the book here was adapted by Jeffrey Sweet from a Bernice Ruben novel by the same name). Three main characters, Amy, Stan, and Gwen, follow different paths with the same ache for love; yet this is really Amy's story. In her most particularly, we see our needs and wounds, our moments of blindness and of insight. With her we sympathize as we witness again love's ability to draw and repel, to afflict and to redeem.

These conventional, though ever-fresh, themes are explored in a somewhat unconventional plot. We meet Amy (played here by Melissa Manchester) in Maine in 1955. She has never married and has given her life to caring for her brother, Stan (Stephen Bogardus), a man crippled by childhood polio. The familiar and settled ways of their lives are altered one summer after Amy impulsively decides to place a "Lady Seeks Gentleman" correspondence ad to which Stan alone--unaware--replies. This conflict and contest unfolds as the sister and brother rent a cottage they own near their home to Gwen (Megan Mullally), a woman finding herself on her own for the first time and uncertain about her place in the world.

Ms. Manchester, Mr. Bogardus, and Ms. Mullally deliver strong, impassioned, and witty performances, supported here by the equally-impressive work of Megan Fay and Paul Anthony Stewart. The singing in this recording--which was produced by L.A. Theater Works and broadcast on NPR--is spectacular. All of the colors of Ms. Manchester's deservedly-celebrated voice are present amid Mr. Bogardus' soaring tenor and Ms. Mullally's very-satisfying mix. Though not yet a widely produced work, this recording makes it clear that "I Sent A Letter to My Love" deserves a prominent place in the musical theater repertoire.