ITCHY AND SCRATCHY

posted by James Reel

    My contribution to the latest Tucson Weekly:

    Live Theatre Workshop has mounted a funny, well-acted and well-directed production of a play that really should be kept in mothballs for another 25 years.
    George Axelrod's The Seven Year Itch is not only missing a hyphen; it's lost any relevance to the way real men and women relate to each other. The 1950s play--about a man, married for seven years, contemplating a dalliance with a sexy young neighbor--trades on antiquated gender stereotypes. Give it another quarter-century, and The Seven Year Itch could be enjoyed as an amusing period piece, as English Restoration comedies are today. But right now, we lack that distance. We're in an in-between period, when the play has lost its currency but isn't quite a classic. For now, it just seems old-fashioned.