“I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”
Tulsa Opera
Lynn Riggs Theatre
Feb. 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 every 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.
With pipes like these in a space this size, it was such a good choice to go mic-free with the audio — one of many good choices made by the design and directing crew, which included Jeremy Stevens, a Tulsa master of musical theatre whom TO called in especially to bring his expertise to this production. Details like having costume changes happen onstage, within a modular closet that formed the backdrop of the set, did wonders for continuity and kept the audience engaged between scenes. (I also loved it as a visual metaphor for “change.”) Some of the Tulsa-specific references the creative team inserted were more successful than others; while I appreciated the effort to connect this piece to here and now, and while audiences always love hearing a place they know called out onstage, inserts like this can feel a little forced.
The production as a whole was a tight, vivid, high-velocity, high-payoff two hours, rolling one short scene efficiently into the next, with each one managing to touch the heart of some truth about love — sort of like a freeze-frame ride on an emotional Zingo, where every new curve reveals a slightly different vista. Those truths ranged wildly in tone, from hilarious (the joy of actually being called by someone who said he’d call you, performed with mock-operatic fervor by Taylor, with Barker and Briggs singing backup dressed as Ken’s Pizza delivery guys) to sincere (the realization that you’re still deeply in love with your partner after many years, as you sit across the kitchen table from them over your morning coffee) to the subtle zone between painful honesty and devastating tenderness that musical theatre navigates so well (like that moment when a recently divorced woman says more than she planned to while recording a dating video).
As elderly strangers getting to know each other at a funeral, Dickey and Barker brought the full waterworks to the crowd near the show’s conclusion with a song called “I Can Live With That.” Who doesn’t wish for a partner who could love you even with all your (and their) limitations, including the big one that comes at the end of every life? The desire to be liked, to be loved, to be seen with care in whatever state one’s in right now: it’s maybe the most embarrassing and the most glorious thing in life, and it’s always a relief to experience it through art (instead of, for two hours at least, through one’s own ruminations). “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” left me feeling every bit as seen and supported as its characters hoped to be. Not to say I couldn’t feel that in a super-sized production of Tosca, but I definitely wouldn’t have laughed so much (or probably seen that fist bump) while it was happening.
