It's understandable if you develop serious second-date jitters before I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change.
Will this remount of last summer's smash success be as charming and witty as you remember? Will Joe DiPietro's lyrics ("Seinfeld set to music," the ads promise) again leave you breathless with laughter? Will the four Ottawa performers - Trish Lackey, Nicole Milne, Kris Joseph and Shaun Toohey - return with skill and verve intact?
Relax. If you saw it last year, and even if you didn't, the remount of I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, playing at the NAC Studio, is a joy from start to finish.
A slick, quick and clever off-Broadway hit, I Love You is all about the hilariously funny, deeply touching and sometime utterly pathetic attempts to make contact with a member of the opposite sex.
It's a pleasure to see the four performers in this Zucchini Grotto production adding depth and nuance to the roles they played so well last year. This time out, Lackey doesn't just sing Always a Bridesmaid, she takes ownership of the song, brandishing the microphone like a country music queen.
Despite the lightning-fast pace, Milne manages to create flesh-and-blood characters. She's equally good as a happy woman contemplating romance and as a desperate divorcee making a dating video.
Toohey's terrific, as well. The restraint he brings to the song Shouldn't I Be Less in Love With You makes it that much more affecting. In the Marriage Tango, he chucks the restraint to give a comic performance as a tired parent making a determined attempt to have a night of passion. Tangoing with Lackey across the stage, he lustily sings the unlikely line, "I'm marrie-e-e-ed.... And I'm gonna have sex."
Joseph shows his depth as a comic performer. In Scared Straight he's outrageously funny as a heavy-breathing, low-browed psychopath, sharing his tale with two choosy singles. There's an uneasy few seconds at the start of this piece. What's funny about a bachelor driven to the mass murder of his married friends? But Joseph's lunatic performance and the sharp writing are both so over the top that it works as a satire on how difficult it is to be single in a couples world.
Later, Joseph is charmingly low-key as an elderly suitor, singing the gently funny I Can Live With That.
Director Ken Godmere makes extremely good use of the expanded performance space. There is still a sense of intimacy and, unlike the Fourth Stage, the venue for last year's production, there are no bad sightlines. The material does, however, come across as a tad more risque in this more formal setting.
Musical director Wendy Berkelaar on piano and Scott Chancey on violin supply the sparkling accompaniment, quickly switching musical genres with each song.
The opening night performance was greeted with a standing ovation, of course, but it wasn't the standard one, as it was accompanied by the kind of yelps and cheers you usually hear at a playoff hockey game.