True love on stage and at home

OREM — Married in real life, David and Brittni Bills Smith and Paul and Melanie McKay Cartwright publicly acted like they were in love long before they really were.

"I tell people we kissed for three months before we ever went out on a date," said Brittni Bills Smith. (She was Ado Annie in SCERA's production of "Oklahoma" and he was her beau, Will Parker.) "Then it was my dad who put us in a car on the night the show was rained out and sent us to get ice cream."

From that "date night" on, David and Brittni became a couple off stage as well as on.

Melanie McKay Cartwright and her new husband, Paul, were faux married for a whole summer as Mary and Parley P. Pratt in the LDS Church's Nauvoo Pageant before they took a serious, romantic look at one another.

Now they're newlyweds living in Provo while Melanie goes to BYU and Paul takes the management path at Enterprise. In their first month, they worked married life around rehearsals for "Zorro" for the Hale Centre Theatre in West Valley.

Both couples combine a love for the stage with love for each other. They're constantly working in the emotional and physical demands of acting with figuring out how to relate as married people.

The Smiths dated for four years, married three years ago and continue to share their private lives, their jobs and their demanding show business endeavors.

The Cartwrights had a whirlwind engagement following years of bumping into each other on stage and working on the same productions.

"We met and really weren't interested in each other in Nauvoo in 2010. He was Parley P. Pratt and I was a performing missionary set apart to dance. We saw each other a few times but nothing came of it.

"Then in 2011, I was Mary Pratt and he was Parley again. There were no love scenes, just a lot of waving and sending off. I was really worried about working with him, but he was always just so kind to me. By the end, we knew we needed to go on a date or two," Melanie said. "By the second week in August, we knew we were going to get married."

Which they did.

Acting on her bishop's advice, Melanie pulled back her bid for a full-time LDS mission, and the two were wed in the Salt Lake Temple on Dec. 30, 2011, on a warm winter day.