Perfectmatches

I Love You revues the dating game

by Carolyn Clay

I LOVE YOU,YOU'RE PERFECT,NOW CHANGE, Book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro. Music by Jimmy Roberts. Directed by Joel Bishoff. Music direction by Kim Douglas Steiner. Set design by James Kronzer. Costumes by Susan J. Slack. Lighting by Daniel Ordower. Sound by Duncan Robert Edwards. With Adam Hunter, Chip Phillips, Kathy St. George, Amy White, and musicians Kim Douglas Steiner and Heidi Braun-Till. At the Stuart Street Playhouse indefinitely.

I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change isn't perfect, but if you were to change it, it would only be to make all of it as good as the best parts. This saucy revue, a love-hate paean to the odd art of modern heterosexual romance, has been running Off Broadway for four years and has also set up shop in other cities around the world. Now the show, in a savvy production by original director Joel Bishoff, inaugurates the newly named Stuart Street Playhouse in Boston's Radisson Hotel. What with the Charles Playhouse having been co-opted by Blue Man Group and Shear Madness, the Theater District could use a thriving Off Broadway venue. And that seems to be the thinking of Woburn natives turned New-York-based stage and film producers Nick Paleologos and Fred Zollo, who have taken over booking the theater and are presenting I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change in tandem with its New York producers.

A likable show with both sweetness and bite, I Love You has been dubbed "Seinfeld set to music." The blurb artist might have added, "and sprinkled with saccharine," because I Love You is a lot less quirky and more lovy-dovy than Seinfeld -- and not so New York-centric, though its focus is urban. A collection of sketches by Joe DiPietro, with a clever pastiche of songs by Jimmy Roberts (with lyrics by DiPietro), the show purports to trace the history of male-female relationships, both through history and through a life. "In the Beginning," intone four monklike figures in hooded bathrobes, "God created Man and Woman -- and that night Man asked Woman if she was busy." And so the mating game has gone, direct address giving way to cell phones and delicate negotiations involving careers, commitment, and condoms. The show's first act deals, in the main, with the pre-mating game, the second with the way the terrifying grail of marriage changes things -- for better and worse.

I Love You has some betters and worses of its own. The show can be genuinely hilarious, the songs (scored for piano and a single violin) both melodious and ironic. But even the less-than-great numbers are cute, and the Boston cast -- Adam Hunter, Chip Phillips, Kathy St. George, and Amy White -- is talented and personable. It's great to see St. George, in particular, applying her considerable adorableness to better material than last season's quick-fizzling Secrets Every Smart Traveler Should Know and ham-fisted Ring Cycle send-up Das Barbecü. The one I Love You cast member who escaped Das Barbecü, Ragtime veteran Adam Hunter, has an expressive putty face on a par with his pipes. And all four performers are good singers who harmonize well, with Amy White offering a soprano that can be wistful or brassy as called for and Chip Phillips capable of turning from nerdiness to macho-cool on a dime.

The comedy here can be broad, as when a late-night-TV lawyer bursts into the arena of intimate relations with a pitch for suing a partner who does not supply sexual satisfaction. Or it can be tongue-in-cheek, as when two busy urban professionals run through an entire relationship, cliché by cliché, in an evening because it's faster than suffering through the actual dating, mating, breaking up, and poignantly looking back. My favorite vignette, "Tear Jerk," employs contrapuntal tunes to depict a movie date on which a woman drags a guy weaned on Clint Eastwood to a weepie whose manipulative sentimentality he ultimately, mortifyingly, cannot resist. Here Phillips's galloping homage to movie mayhem is juxtaposed with St. George's hilariously lugubrious but quite pretty ditty recapping the film's thwarted-love-and-deathbed plot (complete with obligatory violin workout).

But there are parts of I Love You that dare to be sincere, including a somewhat embarrassing but well-sung ballad for White in the first act ("I Will Be Loved Tonight") and a sweet ode to a 30-year marriage in the second. The latter, "Shouldn't I Be Less in Love with You?", is crooned across the breakfast table by a bathrobe-clad Hunter to a St. George lost in her morning Globe. And DiPietro's lyrics can be a stitch, as in St. George's C&W "Always a Bridesmaid," which rhymes "satin" with "fat in" and "taffeta" with "laugh at ya." Sure, there are numbers in the show, as in most revues, that are filler and a few that are belabored. But when I Love You is at its most lovable, you wouldn't change a thing.