‘Two of a Kind’s’ Couple of First-Rate Second Bananas

Christopher Sieber and Sally Wheeler will forgive you if you haven’t noticed their coy, romantic comedy on prime-time TV.

After all, it’s hidden away in ABC’s kid-happy TGIF lineup as the adult half of “Two of a Kind,” the sitcom showcase for preteen superstar twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Sieber is good-looking single dad Kevin Burke, a college professor who has Wheeler’s daffy-sexy college student Carrie Moore around to baby-sit his too-precious girls.

It’s comical, to be sure, but so far more coy than romantic. While the girls are consumed with friends, school, the usual kids’ stuff--Dad and baby-sitter seem to be too busy dating around and needling each other to give in to passion--or as much passion as a TV-Y rating will allow.

“Actually, we just had our first awkward pre-kiss moment,” Wheeler said with a laugh in her dressing room at Warner Bros., where the show is filmed. “I’m like, whoa! I almost kissed you. I need a minute by myself.”

As Kevin and Carrie follow their hearts, they spin out a farcical battle of the sexes.

All is supposedly business between professor and student, so when he hires her to supervise the girls’ sleepover party, who should show up to deliver a midnight pizza but a guy from class--and the professor’s clumsy attempt to explain it to the other students the next morning only turns snickers into guffaws. When Carrie dates Kevin’s doctor, she discovers he seems to be wearing a bra. She drops him and the doc demands that Kevin explain why--by turning a stress test treadmill all the way up.

The physical comedy is served up in heaps. When Kevin announces he’s got a date with a supermodel, Carrie’s knowing chortles are infectious. When Kevin kicks at a stubborn pipe, it bursts, soaking him. He practically destroys Carrie’s new apartment trying to build her a bookshelf.

Richard Correll, who has directed most of the episodes, said their tremendous chemistry makes the comedy work so well.

“He plays shy, not sure of himself around women, but he doesn’t come across nerdy. He’s just a real likable guy, the guy next door,” Correll said. “And Sally is a director’s dream. She’s pretty and she’s very funny, too. It’s a combination that’s hard to come by.”

“They are very good actors, and they’ve created great conflict, great tension--sexual tension,” adds TV veteran Gilbert Junger, who directed the pilot and knows about creating tension, having been Emmy-nominated for directing the “Ellen” coming-out episode.

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Stage veterans in their first TV roles, Wheeler and Sieber have a good sense of humor about playing second bananas to a pair of cuddly moppets.

“At first I was a little jealous because they were getting all the press,” said the sturdy, 6-foot-2 Sieber, whom New York critics called “princely” and “hunky” in a 1997 Broadway production of “Triumph of Love.”

“But I realized the girls are really working hard out there on all those interviews, so I said I’ll just sit back here and watch TV,” he said with a chuckle, stretched out on a sofa in his dressing room.

The stage has been part of Sieber’s life since third grade in a tiny town in Minnesota when he worked in children’s productions in Minneapolis. After high school he enrolled in the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, and his booming baritone won him his first Broadway role, as young Jacob Marley in the musical “A Christmas Carol.”

He moved right into a role in “Boys in the Band,” then joined “Triumph of Love” out of town and helped bring it to Broadway, co-starring with F. Murray Abraham, Susan Egan and Betty Buckley. The show’s close left him free to land the sitcom role.

In her somewhat more chaotically arranged dressing room next door, Wheeler, who has a graduate degree in theater, daydreams about playing Medea or Lady Macbeth again. But bringing to TV her ability to project comedy to the upper balcony, she says she can sometimes hear off-camera whispers after a take: “Is she really going to do that?”

“I have to tone it down,” she said. “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Did I over-mug that line?’ ”

Perhaps her free-spirited character’s most endearing quality can be seen in her eyes. Carrie projects a perpetual readiness to run off on some devilish adventure. In fact, she said, she patterned her character after a best friend and a cousin, who at the merest mention of snow will show up the next morning with their skis and a bottle of tequila.

The daughter of a singer mother married to a lawyer and judge in rural Polk County, Fla., Wheeler took early to the stage, starting at 9. She failed an audition for “The King and I,” but she stuck to it, She was also a constant companion to her theater-loving mother.

She had an advantage when a college course took up George Bernard Shaw.

“It’s difficult to see Shavian productions--they are hardly ever produced. But I had seen five,” Wheeler said. “My mother didn’t care if I was ready for ‘Arms and the Man.’ I was 12, she dragged me off and I saw it. We’d go see ‘Waiting for Godot’ and I didn’t have any idea what was going on. But she gave me a real background in dance, music.”

A college internship with a New York television producer introduced her to the business behind the small screen. Later, she says she more than paid her dues by earning her SAG card--shooting a toothpaste commercial in 85 takes.

Now she receives fan mail, but her biggest fan is her new husband, an investment banker she wed during the show’s Christmas production break.

Most who recognize her or write are little girls who ask things like what it’s like when Mary-Kate hugs her. Some want to know when Carrie and Kevin will finally get married.

First, of course, somebody has to win that battle of the sexes.

“Sally is so smart,” Ashley said after a rehearsal. “She’s such a good actress and she’s always reading books.”

“And Chris would make a great dad,” Mary-Kate added. “He makes the funniest faces. He does a real good frog and a great lizard.”

* “Two of a Kind” airs at 8 p.m. on Fridays. The network has rated it TV-Y (suitable for young children).