An odd yet charming 'Minister's Wife

Don't go to "A Minister's Wife" expecting "My Fair Lady." Although the new musical at Lincoln Center Theater is an adaptation of a play by George Bernard Shaw, this one is far less a Broadway musical comedy than an odd but bracing little chamber opera.

Do go, however, if you want to see a rich, original, handsomely performed and produced 100-minute curiosity with some deadly self-consciousness and more ravishing music by Joshua Schmidt, best known here for his startling musical based on "The Adding Machine."

Though this one seems a bit more finely crafted than wildly inspired, the show, adapted by Austin Pendleton, is a concise retelling of "Candida," Shaw's 1894 serious comedy about a romantic triangle, a good man's self-deception and the real power behind a successful Victorian marriage.

It is hard to imagine a more worthy cast than the one gathered here for director Michael Halberstam's production, first done with different designers and two of the five current actors at his thriving Writers' Theatre in suburban Chicago.

Despite the title, the character in deepest conflict is the minister, a dedicated spokesman for the poor, but one whose wife's smitten young admirer considers a self-satisfied moralist windbag. Marc Kudisch strides delightfully between each persona, his kindness and grandiosity challenged as his chiseled features go slack with insecurity.

Kate Fry, who originated the role in Chicago, has a fresh, forthright clarity as Candida, a character whose resemblance to the infantilized Nora in Ibsen's "A Doll's House" disappears with her grasp of her power. Bobby Steggert is terrifically charming and obnoxious as the rapturous, manipulative young poet. Liz Baltes, as the secretary, and Drew Gehling, the curate, are equals in the ensemble.

Schmidt uses demanding vocal lines to expose unspoken vulnerabilities and the shifting contradictions in Shaw's sympathies. The songs, often waltzes and hymns, push against late 19th-century romanticism with unsettled harmonies, jagged rhythms and cluster chords that, every so often, suggest "A Little Night Music," though without anything like Sondheim's witty lyrics.

An expert string quartet plays from behind a florid wallpaper scrim on Allen Moyer's set of cluttered, lived-in, comfortable Victoriana. David Zinn's costumes say much about social class without exaggeration. Though it's easier to admire the production's care than to care deeply about the material, the skill and the ambition are real.

WHAT "A Minister's Wife"

WHERE Mitzi E. Newhouse, Lincoln Center Theater

INFO $85; 212-239-6200; lct.org

BOTTOM LINE Odd but bracing little chamber opera