How Do You Do I Love You

• Stock Tryout Tour (1967)

Click on the title for info on the song.

Original score

• Just Across the River
• Life Is Too Short
• Zeroing in on You
• Houses in Larchmont
• Pleased with Myself
• Nine to Five
• Still Single
• When He Marries Me
• You've Got a Good Thing Going
• How Do You Do, I Love You
  • aka How Do You Do I Love You [no note]
• Her Laughter in My Life
• Whatever You Want Me to Be
• One Step
• This Is the Day
• A Different Drummer
• A Life Full of Surprises

Cut during tryout

• Meet My Girl

• Studio Demo [audio]

Alice-Frances lives with her parents in East Orange, New Jersey. Alice-Frances's mother has printed up wedding invitations minus one piece of info — the groom's name.

Alice-Frances heads across the river to Manhattan to find a job, hoping that will lead her to a husband. She lands a job in an insurance company that has a computer named Bella. Bella has information on everybody. When fed Alice-Frances's information, Bella prints out an address containing the largest concentration of eligible bachelors in New York City. Alice-Frances goes hunting.

Alice-Frances meets four of the men and wows them all, but her office-mates are skeptical that this will work out for her.

But the plan does work: Alice-Frances gets proposals from each of the four guys in turn. All is well and good until, at the office celebration, Alice Mary gets a congratulatory kiss from Evans, her creepy boss — and fireworks happen.

In the second act, the computer's capabilities in the dating arena are reported on the news and two of the secondary characters try to use the computer as a dating service. Meanwhile, Alice-Frances won't make up her mind which of the four guys she wants to marry. She ends up going down the aisle with all four in a nightmare wedding sequence, but at the last minute she refuses all of them. She ends up with Evans, even though Bella gives the relationship four days. 

When first announced, the show was to be produced by music publisher Edwin Morris. He hired Carolyn Leigh and Elmer Bernstein to write the score. They worked on it at first simultaneously with working on How Now Dow Jones, which Morris was also to produce. Leigh and Bernstein dropped out of How Do You Do I Love You, on which they were replaced by Richard Maltby and David Shire, who were recommended to Michael Stewart by Stephen Sondheim.

When How Now Dow Jones was produced, Morris was no longer involved. The show was produced by David Merrick.

Several songs that Leigh and Bernstein wrote for How Do You Do I Love You ended up in How Now Dow Jones.

• How Do You Do, I Love You (no note)