My Husband’s Wild Desires Almost Drove Me Mad

2007 season · Production archive

Can a modern American wife who suspects she is the reincarnation of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat find happiness with a macho husband, a voyeuristic apartment super, a nervous burglar and a sister who has been abandoned by her husband? The onstage answers break laugh records all over the world.

Written by

John Tobias

Directed by

Wade P. Wood

Ran

June 15 – July 21, 2007

About the production

Tobias’s comedy is a staple of the American community and small professional circuit rather than a title with a Broadway history, and its presence in the Vic’s summer slot is a good illustration of how a seventy-five-seat house builds a year. Winter and spring carried the weight — Shakespeare, farce, the return of Dead Man Walking — and summer took something light enough to survive a Denver July in a basement.

The five-character structure, single apartment set and steady stream of interruptions put it in the same practical family as the British farce staged three months earlier. Between them the two comedies covered most of the Vic’s 2007 running weeks and paid for the rest of the season.

Where it sat in the season

It was production 4 of 8 in the Vic’s 2007 season. It followed Dead Man Walking (Apr 20 – Jun 7, 2007) and was followed by Barefoot in the Park (Jul 27 – Sep 1, 2007). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

---

This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.