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.#

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