By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic
February 4, 2005
Something good just got better at Winter Park Playhouse, where the fluffy little musical revue I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change has returned for yet another Valentine's-season appearance. Clearly audiences have found something to like about Love/Perfect/Change, a show that, after nearly 81/2 years of performances, is the longest-running off-Broadway musical in New York. Now, it seems, so have a bunch of theatergoers in Central Florida -- at least those who have found their way to the tiny storefront theater near the intersection of Orange and Fairbanks in Winter Park, where the show has returned for the third year in a row.
There, this comical revue, which documents the joys and peculiarities of dating, love and marriage, has acquired an even better four-person cast. Love/Perfect/Change is too silly to be everyone's box of chocolates. But for plenty of folks, an evening like this one is about as welcome a valentine as anyone can find.
Love/Perfect/Change is like speed dating to the max -- a quick trip from a first encounter to engagement, weddings, parenthood, divorce, old age and starting over. This show indulges all the stereotypes that relationship-seekers run from -- long-winded men, women who cry at the movies, arm-twisting parents and so on. But the witty book and lyrics (by Joe DiPietro, with likable music by Jimmy Roberts) present such a daffy take on most of those stereotypes that you can't help but laugh.
As directed by Michael Edwards and performed by a nifty cast -- Roy Alan, Heather Alexander, Patrick Brandt and Heather Lea Charles -- Love/Perfect/Change goes for guffaws most of the time but knows when to step back and let a little genuine sentiment slip through. Alan and Alexander, who are husband and wife offstage, are old hands at this material: Alan wrings the most out of his cartoonlike characters, and the versatile Alexander finds comedy and pathos in the needy women she plays. At the same time, Brandt and Charles bring something new. For Charles, who played an exuberant Eliza Doolittle in Mad Cow Theatre's My Fair Lady, it's a warmth that infuses all her characters; for Brandt, it's his way of throwing himself into exaggerated roles, from a psycho killer to a new father whose language has become as infantile as his kid's.
One or two scenes don't work in this loosely woven little show, and the theater could spend some attention on its lighting (and on the steps to the stage, which trip everyone walking by). But Love/Perfect/Change manages to straddle a difficult line -- to be absolutely ruthless about relationships and to elicit a tear or two. It must be doing something right.
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