A
Musical To Warm Your Heart: I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change
By
Sybil Maimin
To
cure the mid-winter blues, get yourself down to the Westside Theater
and see I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, a fast-paced
musical ode to the timeless rituals of mating. Very funny and
often wise, the 17 sketches are introduced by the cast in white
hooded robes incanting at the moment of creation, “And the Lord
said, Let there be man and woman.” The play’s theme of games and
vulnerabilities between the sexes is brilliantly established as
the first man asks the first woman if she is busy, and she replies
she will have to check her date book, before being reminded there
are no other men in the world.
Romping through the generations, the two men and two women cast,
playing multiple roles, sing their way through a first date between
time-starved busy young professionals, a visit with parents of
a new baby who so mimic their child’s level of speech and activities
that a single buddy tells them to “call me when he graduates from
college,” and a pick-up at a funeral home where an elderly widow
and widower meet and realize romance can come again. Many stops
are made along the way, and although the situations are familiar
(a strength of the play as the audience recognizes and laughs
at itself), writer and lyricist Joe DiPietro brings a decidedly
fresh, on-target perspective to the material. We see a vulnerable
divorcee making her first dating video, a singles group being
counseled by an inmate at a meeting at Attica Prison, a never
married bridesmaid advising that the “rainbow of grotesque gowns
in my closet have outlasted the marriages,” and a long-married
man musing about his bathrobed wife across the breakfast table
with, “Shouldn’t I Be Less in Love With You?” Spirited accompaniment
by piano and violin ranges across musical styles including jazz,
be-bop, and country. Cast members are uniformly excellent, bringing
credibility to each new role as they effortlessly adopt changing
personas. The play is about the need for connections and the foibles,
insecurities, desperate measures, and hopeful results that the
quest can entail. It is entertaining, yet insightful, witty, yet
touching, and it is about us.#
Education Update, Inc., P.O. Box 20005, New York, NY 10001. Tel:
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the publisher. © 2001.
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