I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change – London Coliseum

Simon Lipkin and Alice Fearn in I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change at the London Coliseum. Picture: Sophie Ross

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change streamed from the London Coliseum and continues until 30 January 2021.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

I Love You? Yes! You’re Perfect? Nothing ever is, is it, but this clever little revue is guaranteed to give you 80 minutes’ respite from the grim world outside, Now Change… why with four high-class performers on tap at the press of a button?

While the huge stage of the empty London Coliseum is hardly the obvious space for a boutique four-hander – the three most recent UK revivals came at dinky venues Jermyn Street, Above The Arts and Chiswick Playhouse although it did have a limited West End run at the Comedy in 1999 – director Kirk Jameson makes it work.

The show suffered a late blip when Trevor Dion Nicholas withdrew because of a family bereavement. Luckily, Simon Lipkin who knew the many roles each actor has to master from the 2015 Above The Arts production was available to join Oliver Tompsett, Brenda Edwards and Alice Fearn and the way this quartet works together is joyous.

It isn’t quite as funny as I remembered from seeing it at Chiswick late in 2019 (totally different cast) but this series of generally unconnected vignettes about love and relationships in all its forms which ran an almost unbelievable 12 years from 1996 to 2008 Off-Broadway is never less than entertaining.

From nervous first date, the awkwardness of where hands should go at the movies, through marriage, babies, divorce and try-again disasters to funerals as a chat-up opportunity, Joe DiPietro’s sharp lyrics and Jimmy Roberts’ pleasing score hit target after target in a naughty but nice way.

All the songs are fit for purpose rather than hummable, the best ballad ‘I Will Be Loved Tonight’ beautifully handled by Edwards while Fearn’s 40-year-old divorcee giving too much information on her ‘The Very First Dating Video’ – “he left me for a size 18 with a bad hip” – is the funniest, so self-flagellating that a kindly, unseen voice asks “would you like to do that again?”

Fearn is in equally good form with Tompsett on ‘A Stud and a Babe’ as they lament drawing the short straw in the good looks stakes – hard to believe this handsome pair could look plain but they do try! – and on ‘Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride’ – “too many weddings, too many messes” envious of friend Edwards in white on her big day.

Plenty of laughs too with gay partners Frank and Frank (Tompsett and Lipkin) so busy with baby-talk, besottedly cooing and fussing over adopted baby Frank Jnr, that visitor Ashley, who brought the brat a teddy bear, is totally ignored.

In the Chiswick version, it was two lesbians in that scene with the visitor a man. Here they go the other way round, both are amusing, and the last sketch differs as well.

The two elderly gay gentlemen attending yet another funeral, one not even sure whose it was, one finally forward enough to suggest a date, charmed and moved me more than this replacement with man trying to talk grieving widow into a date.

‘Funerals Are For Dating’ is not quite the end because all four return for the upbeat ‘I Can Live With That’ concluding that all relationships, whatever their sexuality or gender, however challenging they are, and whatever compromises have to be made, are, in the end, worth the effort. Well, maybe not all…

Updated with a few topical references (though nothing on Trump!), this classy Lambert Jackson production in partnership with the London Coliseum has the ever-reliable Nick Barstow in charge of the music and Julie Atherton as associate director. There are one or two rude bits so probably not a good idea to invite maiden aunts.

The original show, with a British premiere at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre in 1999, failed to catch fire when briefly brought to the West End – maybe the humour was too American – but if you can run up 5,003 performances Off-Broadway, go round the world and be translated into 17 languages, you must be doing something right and this lightweight charmer is a winner.

Jeremy Chapman