Love of my life

Love isn’t always as perfect as you think it is. Rarely does it even come close. That’s just reality, and it’s the idea explored in The Cosmopolitan Cabaret’s latest musical comedy I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.

It’s a collection of funny and serious vignettes about love, relationships and life. Michael Dotson, Jerry Lee, Jennifer Malenke and Melissa WolfKlain each play dozens of characters in the production, which is somewhat linear: It begins with God creating man and woman, and continues on with dating, engagement, marriage, kids, divorce, old age and death.

Costumes, lights and staging are simple and effective. Sacramento’s Graham Sobelman—of Graham-A-Rama fame—is the production’s musical director, and his straightforward piano playing provides the only musical accompaniment for the actors. Overall, it’s pretty minimalist, breaking each scene about love down to its essence.

But instead of touching on psychological stages of love such as “lust,” “attraction” and “attachment,” scenes explore parts of relationships such as: “all my friends are married,” “his parents want grandkids” and “my first online dating video after our divorce.” These settings allow characters to mine comedic territory, and all four actors create humor through song and funny facial expressions.

It’s a great production to take a date to. Indeed: Dozens of proposals have occurred—all successful—during stagings of the off-Broadway musical, which first opened in 1996. In I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change the tragic and lighthearted are intertwined, and you never know which one is going to hit you in the gut.