"Do I Hear a Waltz?" is an entirely serious and very dry musical about an American tourist who goes to Venice and doesn't have any fun. What more can I tell you?…

From his earlier play, "The Time of the Cuckoo," and without doing much more than thinning it out, Arthur Laurents has devised a small diary in which the loneliness, and then the stubbornness, and then the rueful awakening of starchy Leona Samish can be recorded for sound. Leona is single, and likely to be. She has come abroad looking for a "wonderful, mystical, magical miracle," but is not finding it.

By the sixth song of the evening, she is still sitting alone over evening coffee singing "Here we are together, me and I." There is a man hovering in the background, to be sure—a shopkeeper, married, rather blunt about these relationships for a girl like...