Close to home

We discovered the ACT HUB with another play just weeks before, Five lesbians eating a quiche.  The ACT HUB is located in that century-old community hall in the Causeway, next to the Kingston Railway station and home of at least one very big kangaroo we saw hopping by as we left, and it hosts a string of local theatrical presentations, seeming to be amusing and worthy and cluey.  This one was I love you, you're perfect, now change.  Again a funny title and a significant off-Broadway history of success.  It's musical theatre, so songs and a small musical accompaniment, here keys and violin, in 2 acts and with some localisation and modernisation.  The first act on forming relationships features online dating, and the second act is all the result, the relationships and weddings and children and losses but also some touching scenes of mature relationships, but it remains predominantly heterosexual.  Modernisation didn't quite reach to LGBTQI+ although there are some mentions of lesbianism as an alternative and one scene has a gay male couple hamstrung and frustrated at home with a child when an old female friend visits for some entertainment.  The cast is 6, comprising 3 men and 3 women, all playing various roles in various romantic pairings and occasional stints as other family members.  Plenty of humour, quite a lot of song, lots of good will from audience and characters alike.  In the end, it portrays something we recognise and value and fear and it does it with some sympathy, so good, in a series of vignettes rather than a single story, and that fits.  The promo says "it celebrates love in all its messy, funny and totally human glory" and "honest...awkward...familiar".  Near enough for jazz, I reckon, even if the music was very much out of music theatre.

I love you, you're perfect, now change was written by Jimmy Roberts (music) and Joe DiPietro (book, lyrics).  This series was directed by Janie Lawson and featured Amelia Andersson-Nickson, Sarah Copley, Connor McNaught, Deborah O'Toole, David Pearson and Sam Thompson (cast) at the ACT HUB with musicians Leo Amadeus (keys, MD) and Laura Lay (violin).