Jonesville’s Sauk Theatre will kick off its fifty-fifth season tonight at 8 p.m. with the opening performance of the seasonally appropriate off-Broadway musical “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.” The production will stage evening shows Thursday through Saturday this week and next, with 3 p.m. matinee performances this Sunday and Feb. 22.
The 1996 musical comedy features an episodic format, with four actors portraying 52 distinct roles during the two-hour performance.
“We’ve been sort of describing it as a theatrical episode of Saturday Night Live,” Sauk executive director Trinity Bird said. “I play everything from an Italian pizza guy to a seventy-year-old man, and everything in between.”
Bird, who is directing “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” for the third time, will star alongside three other Sauk veterans: Emily DeBoard, Savannah Doster, and Tony Myers. Kristi Gautsche, the play’s musical director, will accompany on the piano.
“I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” offers an anecdotal survey of romance in America, relying on well-known tropes to trace a timeline through unrelated scenes.
“Act I is about dating, and then at the end of the act there’s a wedding,” Bird said. “Act II starts with the honeymoon period and having kids and ends with older age couples: what life is like as senior citizens in love.”
Doster said that these wide-ranging topics will give everyone in the audience something to relate to.
“You can relate to it if you’re single, you can relate to it if you’re married or divorced,” she said.
Satire is this production’s bread and butter, and while some of the themes are a little shopworn – over-talkative guys, couples striving to meet unrealistic stereotypes, a macho man’s unsuccessful attempts to remain dry-eyed during a chick flick – they are largely redeemed by the play’s clever lyrics and snappy tunes.
Chemistry between actors is critical, especially considering the small cast and the play’s focus on intimate relationships. Fortunately, Bird, Doster, Myers, and DeBoard have had many opportunities to develop this chemistry in previous productions. In 2012, all four had roles in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”
In fact, Bird’s professional relationship with Myers and DeBoard runs all the way back to the latter two’s days at Bronson Jr./Sr. High School, where they participated in extracurricular plays directed by Bird.
“I directed the musical in Bronson for six years,” Bird said. “I technically ran the musical theatre department.”
Even with good chemistry, a play like “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” presents many unique challenges. For example, with 52 characters crammed into a two-hour production, costume changes are tight.
“Every one of those characters has a different costume,” Bird said. “There are some points where there are essentially ten to fifteen seconds for us to change the setting and costumes.”
Beyond the logistics of costumes, Myers and Doster said that portraying such a wide variety of characters can be an enormous mental workout for an actor.
“It’s hard enough to get into character once before a show,” Doster said. In this production, “every scene you’ve got to go out of one character and back into a different one, in sometimes five seconds. It’s the best part, and the scariest part.”
The minimalistic cast also presents musical challenges. With only four singers, pitchy notes have nowhere to hide.
“If you don’t know a note, it’s going to be blatantly obvious,” Myers said. “Someone who’s musically coherent in the audience is going to know.”
Despite these challenges, the cast of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” is excited to begin the production.
“What’s great about the play is that it’s really funny, and it’s sometimes over the top, but it’s real; it’s human,” Bird said.
Tickets for tonight’s performance are $5 and will be available at the Sauk. Tickets will cost $12 for the remainder of the production.
