Tulsa Opera: “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”
Lynn Riggs Theatre
February 8, 2024
Legacy arts companies take a huge gamble when they try something new. Core audiences might decamp for more traditional pastures. Hoped-for new audiences might not show up. Quality might suffer. But the risks Tulsa Opera is taking in its 75th anniversary season—part of a company-wide effort to make this art form more relevant, approachable, and accessible in Tulsa—are consistently hitting big.
There’s a direct lineage between opera and musical theater, and with its Valentine’s-adjacent performances of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Tulsa Opera found the sweet spot between the two in a musically top-notch, fourth-wall-breaking, totally charming, totally sold out production starring TO artists Paige Dickey, Natalie Grace Taylor, Andrew Barker, and Sam Briggs. (From my actual notes at press preview night: “Did I just witness the first in-character artist/audience fist bump in Tulsa Opera history?”) It turns out there’s a market for hearing voices that are trained to do anything do everything—and for stories that hit a little closer to the experience of contemporary human beings than traditional opera usually goes.
This 1996 musical comedy—the second longest running in off-Broadway history—is about love: its awkwardness, its thrills, its evolution through the vicissitudes of life. One early scene sets the stage for the many stages of love the show ends up tackling. Taylor (in a note-perfect ‘90s getup complete with Nokia phone, chunky heels, and Dana Scully eyeshadow) meets Barker for a date, which turns into a self-aware and highly relatable romp in which they jump ahead to all the possible future interactions to come. “Let’s go to when we bittersweetly bump into each other” months after the inevitable breakup, they sing, laying out the anxiety and anticipation of all the feelings for us to experience for the rest of the show.
The appreciation in the crowd was palpable as the performers shimmied, side-eyed, snort-laughed, and sighed through these scenes with an impressive blend of robust technique and natural humanity. As they shifted among an insane range of characters, from a nerdy young man on a first date to a perpetual bridesmaid to new parents descending into exhaustion and inane babytalk, these singers filled out each musical gesture in a way that made me hear the “opera” in their voices without feeling “OPERA.” Each of them was flawless, but in both pathos and comedy (I’ll never hear the words “mousse cake” again without laughing) Taylor was a revelation, giving each line and look and luscious vibrato a crystal-clear intention.