REVIEW: In Final Weekend @ Centenary Stage, "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" Offers Wry look at Dating, Marriage & Middle Age

By Jane Primerano, Guest Critic

The Sitnik Theatre at Centenary College was rocking with laughter on Thursday, Aug. 8, as six talented performers mined the comedic depths of dating, relationships, marriage, family and all the stresses that come with them.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, is a two-act musical revue that takes the audience on an uncomfortable journey from Tinder to teenage kids. The audience’s knowing chortles, giggles and eye rolls proved romance is universally difficult and inevitably funny.

The six performers are all amazing singers, dancers and actors. They play a variety of mostly unnamed characters going through the horrors of first dates (one solution is to pretend it’s NOT the first day), awkward dinners that feature more lying than wine and triggering the “moron switch” when discussing a home cooked meal.

When the three female characters sing about the “single man drought” which obviously every women in the audience has experienced. When a man does appear he may actually be married, or he may talk incessantly about himself or pretend he is someone he isn’t. It isn’t often one sees a toupee tossed into a grand piano. . .

Some of the vignettes are so familiar and hilarious the laughter threatened to drown out the singing.

A couple is having dinner with his parents, who think they are announcing their engagement when they are actually announcing their breakup. The parents are not thrilled with hearing that he isn’t ready and she wants to focus on her career. The mother proves she has a good throwing arm...

The requisite lousy sex vignette features a team of lawyers doing a Jacoby & Meyers-like commercial.

The sexting vignette gets an upper-case, bold-faced 48-point R rating and is totally hysterical. I hope the men in the audience were listening carefully to what the women said.

Act I ends with a very funny wedding, probably as funny as many wedding really are.

The essential ugly bridesmaids dress song is spot-on. One of the dresses was eerily familiar to one my daughter wore. “My friends can’t assess a man or a dress,” is a refrain too many of us could have sung.

Middle age comes to the characters in the form of a divorcee whose husband left her for a “limping grandmother.” So she got a golden retriever.

Old age comes, too, with a couple discussing all the funerals they recently attended and then the man turning it into a pickup like. Spoiler alert, it works.

There are some serious songs, “I Will Be Loved Tonight” and “Shouldn’t I Be in Love with You?”

It seems unfair to single out one member of the cast, although I really loved Kayla Chirip’s bridesmaid’s song. The rest of the cast was wonderful as well: Cody Jackson, Lenessa Age, Cassandra Krajcik, Kevin Wehrhahn and James Gerard Russo.

Book and lyrics are by Joe DiPietro, music is by Jimmy Roberts. Co-directors and choreographers of this production are Lia Antolini-Lid and Jillian Petrie.

Unfortunately, the show closes Sunday, Aug. 11, but if you get a chance to see it Friday at 8, Saturday at 8 or Sunday at 2, please go.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change will be performed at the Sitnik Theatre, 715 Grand Ave., Hackettstown, on the campus of Centenary University. For more information, or to purchase tickets, visit centenarystageco.org or call the Centenary Stage Company box office at (908) 979-0900.