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The play centers around the courtship of Mandy and Nelson, who have been burned many times. Of course, this is a musical comedy, where all endings are happily ever after.

“It has an irreverent spin,” Gray says. “It’s sometimes seems like it’s Saturday Night Live doing a spoof on me.”

Gray fans might even be disappointed that there is no cave on the set for actors to hide in when the women are singing their ears off. “The characters just talk about the cave,” he says. “Showing it might have been too obvious.”

A Music Teacher’s Dream

One can only imagine what will happen if this play succeeds, and the publishers of Sex for Dummies and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People take their message to the Great White Way.

Still, Gray says he never envisioned the American theater as the next bastion of multifaceted marketing. The idea for setting Men Are From Mars to music came from Rita Abrams, who was teaching piano to one of Gray’s three daughters.

“I brought it up several years ago. John encouraged me, so I started working on it,” she says. “I didn’t spend a lot of time with John. But I was very familiar with his work and he gave me a lot of feedback.”

Mars and Venus on a Diet

For Gray, it seems, the Venus and Mars juggernaut will roll on indefinitely. His new book, Practical Miracles for Mars and Venus, dispenses mind and body health tips, including a natural-energy diet that emphasizes drinking lots of water and avoiding refined sugar.

In a market glutted with self-help recipes, Gray’s continued success is astounding, especially considering he got his doctorate from a correspondence school (the Columbia Pacific University in San Rafael, Calif.).

Gray, now 48, studied under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, famous for tutoring the Beatles in meditation. He lived as a monk for nine years, and was in a prolonged period of celibacy that he decided to devote his life to helping couples communicate.