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Orange County Register by Eric Marchese
It wouldn't be too far from the truth - or, too cynical - to say that men
and women in the modern, civilized world spend their lives trying to fing
the right mate, and that once they do, they spend the rest of their lives
trying to change them.
That's the premise, handled with tongue solidly in cheek, behind "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change," a rather compact musical revue by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts. Now in its seventh year, the show has had the longest run of any revue to play off-Broadway. Its framework is a loosely connected series of songs and vignettes, and its demands are relatively simple: a basic all-purpose set, a handful of actors, and a musician or two to perform Roberts' score.
The show did well at the Laguna Playhouse a few years ago, but how can it fare at a cavernous venue like the 1,100-seat Carpenter Center in Long Beach without being swallowed up? Musical Theatre West's solution is to "open up" the work. The focus of Kevin Clowes' set is its center, built onto the stage's revolving platform to do away with the need for set changes. But the musicians are placed onstage, on a raised tier to one side. The opposite side is dominated by a large movie-theater-like screen onto which the names of each song or skit is projected in black and white. It's a striking conceit similar to Woody Allen's use of subtitles in some of his recent films, and one that works beautifully.
Arranged thematically, the material begins with the dating scene and the singles life through to romance, love, the cementing of the relationship and, as the first act concludes, the wedding. The second act picks up the wedding theme and covers the early stages of married life and parenthood, them documents the way marriage changes how each member of the couple relates to the other.
Not all of the material fits the show's concept. At least a couple of the second-act vignettes, however charming, are not a good fit - a piece on a family of four driving each other crazy during a lengthy trip by car and a skit on an elderly widower picking up an elderly widow in a funeral home really seem to be pushing the boundaries of what "I Love You, You're Perfect ..." professes to cover.
It's odd, too, how the title song, which expresses the show's primary dictate (of men and women mating, then trying to change their mates), isn't even performed until the show's final few moments. Nor is Roberts' music anything to write home about. Most of it is obviously derived from well-established musical forms (from doo-wop to country-Western to the tango), many of which it parodies.
It's DiPietro's lyrics that give "I Love You..." even the slightest chance of winning over an audience. They're inventive, cleverly handling pedestrian subjects with such skill as to cause us to laugh in recognition of something we knew all along.
MTW's staging, directed by Larry Raben, boasts a cast of four who grab hold of the material and run with it. Each of the four - Stan Chandler, Tami Tappan Damiano, Susan Hoffman and lance Roberts - essays numerous characters with ease. We get the nerdy lovers (Chandler, Damiano) who dream of being ultra cool, the woman (Hoffman) who's got a closetful of hideous bridesmaid gowns, the parents (roberts, Damiano) who sarcastically chide their adult kids for remaining single, the new dad (Roberts) who's been around infants so much that he routinely converses in baby-speak, and the single gals (Damiano, Hoffman) who offer the female perspective on the dating scene and their counterparts (Chandler, Roberts) who offer comic retort.
All four are versatile performers skilled at singing and creating a character with just a few broad strokes, but Damiano is the show's standout. Her many characterizations are distinctive and funny, and she delivers several of the show's musical highlights - notably, her lovely, under stated solo work on "I Will be Loved Tonight," a pretty melodic number with tender lyrics about going a lifetime without physical intimacy to add warmth and meaning to life.
Damiano shows her comedic skills in many ways, including her work in the inspired song "He Called Me," in which her character is crowned "Miss Phone" and awarded a trophy with a pink telephone mounted on it. The actress also delivers this show's dramatic knockout punch, an emotionally powerful vignette about a woman creating her first videotape for a dating service. With her back to the audience but her face visible in close-up on the screen, Damiano's delivery of the monologue is an acting tour-de-force, moving from self deprecating humor to a wrenching and personal account of her divorce and its aftermath.
Chandler and Hoffman make good on the "Marriage Tango" song's theme of a couple so exhausted by the day-to-day business of "running" their marriage, they've all but forgotten what it's like to have sex. Chandler's shining moment arrives late in the play, in another great confessional song - this one a solo about a husband who realizes, during the conspicuous silence of breakfast with his wife, that he's still crazy about her even after 30 years of marriage. Hoffman's considerable comical skills are well displayed in the "Always a Bridesmaid" number, proving that the show's best songs are its solos.
Musical director Diane King Vann ably performs the score from an onstage piano. A large heart-shaped screen is used to set each scene through projected lights that create everything from stained glass windows to towering skyscrapers - further proof that what we're most familiar with can still surprise and , occasionally, move us.
It's
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