Review: I LOVE YOU - You're Privileged, Now Change

There is a meme making the rounds on Facebook at the moment. Above an image of the cast of the television series, FRIENDS, a caption reads: 'This documentary of White Privilege is kinda long and hard to watch, but DAMN. Really lays it all out there.' This revival of I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE, currently at Theatre on the Bay and transferring to Pieter Toerien's Montecasino Theatre next month, offers the musical theatre equivalent of that perception.

Presented in the form of sketches and songs, Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts attempt to dramatise the full scope of contemporary relationships in I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE, with the show covering blind dates, first dates, romance, sex, marriage, parenting, divorce and death. Its episodic structure, with characters that shift from scene to scene, is ideally suited to exploring a diverse range of experiences, and the show manages to juggle a lifetime of romantic situations, even if it fosters a disappointingly heteronormative worldview from start to finish.

With its premiere run in New Jersey dovetailing neatly with the end of the first season of FRIENDS and its off-Broadway debut following the second season of that long-running sitcom, the show was a hit, emulating in many ways the kind of screwy logic that made 1990s sitcoms so popular at the time. Truth be told, I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE owes a more to SEINFELD than it does to FRIENDS, although it is neither as idiosyncratic nor as well-written as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld's creation. But it was FRIENDS that had captured the attention of the public when the show made its bow, with an estimated 11 million women getting themselves "the Rachel haircut" and everyone wondering whether Rachel and Ross would ever work things out.

Against that backdrop, the appeal of I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE makes more sense than it does in South Africa in 2016. The show is dated, its mid-nineties attitude chaffing against attempts to make it feel as relevant as it may have felt back then, mostly by updating one or two of the pop culture references and the presence of gadgets like smartphones. What prompted guffaws twenty years ago is as likely to incite groans today. Such reactions are not unexpected: reruns of MAD ABOUT YOU reflect the same sort of decay. What is surprising, though, is the decision to take this show - already one that freezes out queer experiences - and to create a production of it that is relentless in its whiteness. Any attempt at universality in the text of I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE is thwarted when an entire life cycle of romantic relationships is explored exclusively through a white, middle-class framework.

It is especially difficult watching a production like this after seeing Jason Robert Brown's SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD at the National Arts Festival. A similarly episodic piece that coincidentally had its debut in the same year as I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE, this student production was rebuilt from the ground up. This production of SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD carefully negotiated the world in which it was presented, re-conceptualising each of its vignettes with some effective translations of the text into local languages along the way.

That kind of mindfulness is lacking in Elizma Badenhorst's frenetic staging of I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE. Her work lacks subtlety, sketching out each episode in the broadest of strokes. Timothy le Roux's musical staging follows suit, his work failing to develop a nuanced choreographic language that defines and develops character.

The quartet of performers in this production are all talented, but Badenhorst's direction does them no favours. Apparently working under the instruction to ham it up no matter what, the actors are unable to deliver performances that are rooted in emotional truth. Claire Taylor makes the most consistent attempt to give her characters some kind of authenticity and is ultimately the most watchable of the four. Against all odds, Neels Clasen finds a grain of honesty in "Shouldn't I Be Less in Love With You?", which is more than Brandon Lindsay achieves at any point in this production, despite being a fine singer. Taryn-Lee Hudson mostly plays a less subtle version of Lina Lamont, the character she played in the recent revival of SINGIN' IN THE RAIN.

Wessel Odendaal's musical direction is solid, as is his playing on stage along with violinist, Danielle Asherson. The sound design by Emily Adams is excellent, probably the best heard at Theatre on the Bay in musical presentations over the past few years. In fact, the production values across the board are high in I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE, with Niall Griffin's set, costume and lighting designs also coming together brilliantly.

The first full-scale musical from VRG Theatrical, I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT NOW CHANGE plays into every perception of musical theatre as a lightweight and irrelevant genre, one that deals in cliché and oversimplification, offering a superficial take on love and relationships. This kind of fluff can be entertaining and certainly has a legitimate claim to its place in the arts industry. Nonetheless, the partial standing ovation for I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT NOW CHANGE on opening night said less about the piece than it does about how much of a commodity white privilege still is in the contemporary South African context. Like FRIENDS, I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE is kind of long and hard to watch, but damn - it really lays it all out there. We have to do better.

I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE runs at Theatre On The Bay in Cape Town until 6 August, after which it transfers to Pieter Toerien's Montecasino Theatre in Johannesburg from 10 August - 4 September. All tickets are available through Computicket. To keep up to date with developments on the production, follow the I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE Facebook page and VRG Theatrical on Twitter.

To post a comment, you must register and login.