Review: Tampa Rep Presents Ken Ludwig's Endearing DEAR JACK, DEAR LOUISE at the Shimberg Playhouse

Letter writing is a lost art form.  If you don’t believe me, just read Lisa Grunawald’s  1999 collection of letters, Letters of the Century, which features all the key correspondents of the 20th Century featuring the likes of Mark Twain, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ethel Rosenberg.  The last part of the book, which takes place at the end of the last Millennium, features emails, which today makes it seem quite quaint.  Although we obviously still email each other, everything in 2026 seems to be texting, DM or IM, or commenting on someone’s social media posts. The fine art of letter writing—a hard copy, pencil to paper and delivered by mail hopefully in the same week—is gone.

Certain plays use this art of letter-writing, usually in a romantic aspect.  Most famous of these is A.R. Gurney’s wildly popular Love Letters from nearly 40 years ago.  In it, two characters, a man and a woman, sit side by side and read 50 years of letters of their courtship, from youth to old age.  The writing is rich, so there is not much action on the stage, but we follow their exploits just the same.  I first saw the A. R. Gurney mega-hit in Beverly Hills in 1990 starring a young Matthew Broderick and some then-unknown actress named Helen Hunt.  The concept was a different couple read the play each week. 

Other letter-writing plays followed, such as Dear Liar, Lark Eden, and Letters from Max, a Ritual.

Most recently, Ken Ludwig of  Lend Me a Tenor and Moon Over Buffalo fame has thrown his hat into this letter-writing and letter-reading theatrical bullpen with his immeasurably entertaining DEAR JACK, DEAR LOUISE.   Set during World War II (1942-1945) and inspired by the playwright’s own parents, the play follows the ups and downs, the glories and the horrors, that these two penpal-lovebirds endured over 80 years ago.  

Jack is an army doctor who eventually will be shipped to war, and Louise is a budding actress who gets to experience one of the greatest decades in American theatre history, the 1940s.  (She also must have gotten into a time machine when she first experiences the groundbreaking Oklahoma!, a musical she sees and describes in detail in a letter from 1942 even though the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical opened on Broadway in March of 1943; I don’t know why anachronisms get me in a nit-picky tizzy, but they do.)

The concept of DEAR JACK, DEAR LOUISE comes across somewhat differently than Love Letters, because the characters don’t just sit or stand in one location and read their letters verbatim. Here, sometimes they go back and forth like they are texting one another rather than scribing long, lugubrious letters read aloud to us (though there are plenty of those as well).  It is also staged, where the actors move about, from typewriter to a dressing screen and beyond.  There’s even a very dramatic battle sequence in Act 2 that’s like a one-man version of Saving Private Ryan.

We follow these two through their many misadventures and their eventual meeting in New York City on VE-Day.  This is not a spoiler alert. We know that this meeting will take place because the famed playwright was born and these are his parents.  We know they’ll get together, that’s a given; we don’t know how, especially since they have never met and don't see one another for years after their first letter (and it takes them seemingly forever to ask the other for a photo of himself or herself, something I found odd).

But the show has such heart, and if you get the right actors, it becomes just about the most fun you can have at the theatre without the overelaborate falling of chandeliers or a diva-crooning “Defying Gravity.”  And the current Tampa Rep production at the Staz Center’s Shimberg Playhouse has two of the finest young actors in our area: Cameron Kubly as Jack and Katie Davis as Louise.  They are so different in their characters—she’s the wise-cracking extrovert while he’s more hesitant and shy—that the whole production more than just works; it soars.

The stalwart Cameron Kubly hits just the right notes as the uncomfortable army doctor, and in the early sections, his stiltedness works wonders.  With his trembly voice, he sometimes acts like a little kid facing a firing squad.  And his dryness and exquisite timing gets plenty of laughs. He rightly eases as the show continues mainly because the character does; he starts off like a block of ice and is eventually melted by love.  And in those moments when he steps into his comfort zone—knowing that the love of his life is a woman he’s never met on the other end of those letters—he’s astonishing.

There is a moment when Mr. Kubly reads from the works of Winston Churchill that garnered fevered applause from the audience. 

The brilliant Katie Davis contrasts greatly to Mr. Kubly’s more formal and reserved qualities.  She reminds me of those fast-talking 40s actresses, like Rosalind Russell or Joanne Dru, whose patter goes machine gun fast.  But she never turns Louise into a caricature.  Her Louise has so many shades, so many moments of vibrancy and even heartbreak, that her joy becomes our joy and her pain becomes our pain.  We are so wanting these two wonderful souls—both heroes in their own right—to get together.  We root for them like we rooted for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle.  And the ending of DEAR JACK, DEAR LOUISE becomes everything that we  had hoped for; I know I am not alone when I admit to wiping away a tear or two from my eyes more than once during this show.

Robin Gordan’s direction is spot on, finding the peaks and valleys, the rhythms of these two talkers. It’s a gloriously mounted production.  Dean Wick’s set design, featuring a rainbow of letters seeming to float overhead, is strong.  Celeste N. Silsby Mannerud’s lighting works, especially in the dramatic World War II sequences.  George Mallory Guy’s sound design gets the job done in the same scenes, but I found some of the sound design choices invasive, forcing itself on the narrative when the words and the actors are strong enough that we don’t need so much background sound and music. The cliché holds true here: Less is often more.

But what a show!  Watching those two actors beautifully inhabiting the roles makes your heart sing.  It made me think of my own parents, who were a decade younger than Mr. Ludwig’s but they had a similar dynamic (theatrical mom, stoic dad).  And I’m sure it will make you wonder about your own parents, their struggles as well as their euphoric highs, an entire life together before you were ever born. 

DEAR JACK, DEAR LOUISE does what theatre does best: It becomes a moveable feast of sorts, where the characters onstage stay with us wherever we go and make us reexamine our own lives and the lives of those we love.  Upon exiting the Shimberg Playhouse after the performance, perhaps you will feel as giddy as I, floating on air, so glad to be alive.

Tampa Rep’s production of Ken Lugwig’s DEAR JACK, DEAR LOUISE plays at the Straz Center’s Shimberg Playhouse until July 26, 2026.  Photo courtesy of James Zanbon Productions.    

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