I Love You, You’re
Perfect, Now Change. Music by Jimmy Roberts. Book and lyrics by Joe Dipietro.
Directed by Janie Lawson. Free Rain Theatre. ACT Hub. To Sept 5.
This is a lean and
funny musical that has been around for a few decades but which has sensibly
been updated to fit the times.
There are no great
surprises in its tracking of relationships between the sexes nor in its music
and songs but it is funny and poignant and a skilled cast of six (Amelia Andersson-Nickson, Connor McNaught, David Pearson,
Deborah O’Toole, Sam Thomson and Sarah Copley) gives it a good run.
There’s no real plot
unless it is the charting of various moments of connection (or non-connection)
between a range of characters. Dating, failing to date, weddings, parenthood, a
fraught family car trip, the perils of texting, the desperation of loneliness,
birth, babies and finding a date at a
funeral are among the matters touched upon in a rapid procession of short
punchy scenes and songs that, if not particularly memorable, do the job.
The cast of the show
There’s an odd chess
metaphor being played out with giant chess pieces on a checkered stage and
mysterious robed figures turn up from time to time to manipulate the action.
The Hub doesn’t always make it possible to see the floor from all parts of the
audience so the metaphor is a little lost except for a late vicious move by a
Queen.
A musical duo (Leo
Amadeus on piano and Laura Lay on violin) are the very hard working orchestra
gorgeously underpinning it all.
Hard to pick favourites
in a large song list but the teamwork and the singing of the cast is excellent
and energetic and the range of ages, characters and genders done
perceptively. The ending, with an
ancient couple picking each other up at a funeral, is an aptly funny comment on
the whole parade of love gone right and love gone wrong.
Alanna Maclean
