Jeffrey Laughrun, Joe Ogren, Katelyn Shreiner & Morgan Tapp
SLO REP is opening its 79th season with a bang—an auspicious beginning to an ambitious lineup of shows for 2025-26, and also in line with the company’s plan, according to Managing Artistic Director Kevin Harris, to celebrate at least part of its 80th anniversary season in a new home in downtown San Luis Obispo.
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, which runs through September 21, is a musical comedy (emphasis on comedy) that features four talented performers exploring romantic relationships from first dates to funerals. The format is a score of vignettes that act like fireworks, presenting a colorful display then fading just in time for the next round of pyrotechnics.
This lucky quartet has been choreographed to success by John Keating, well-known locally for providing his expertise since 2023 as artistic director for The Great American Melodrama. Lacey McNamara provides the nimble musical direction, as she did last season for SLO REP’s The Musical of Musicals (The Musical!) and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Jeffrey Laughrun, Joe Ogren, Katelyn Shreiner, and Morgan Tapp are our guides on this entertaining romp through tropes of dating, marriage, and parenting. Despite an ominous opening featuring smoke and eerie lighting and a quasi-Biblical intonement setting us up for a show that looks like it might be serious—the rest of this two-hour shindig is anything but.
We are reminded that relationships and our never-ending quest to master them can be nerve-wracking and desperation-reeking: a bright-eyed Tapp and an appealing Laughrun reveal plenty of self-doubt about their imperfections in a number early in the first act, singing “I’m not a babe” and “I’m not a stud,” followed by all four performers contributing to the very funny vignette “Men Who Talk and the Women Who Pretend They’re Listening.”
As a matter of fact, the vignette titles as listed in the program (“The Lasagna Incident,” “The Very First Dating Video of Rose Ritz”) are often as amusing as the scenes that unfold on stage in the relatively short but snappy songs that explicate them (“Single Man Drought” and “Always a Bridesmaid” come to mind—the latter giving the hilarious Shreiner a chance to shine.)
“When a Man Texts a Woman” and its song “A Picture of His . . .” is a cringe-worthy but very funny example of the ability of the authors, playwright Joe DiPietro and composer Jimmy Roberts, to capture moments of truth while giving the performers many opportunities to show off their acting and vocal chops.
If the remaining shows in SLO REP’s 79th season live up to the standard this production sets, audiences are in for many treats.”
All the cast members exhibit a strong physicality that keeps the show moving, with Ogren leading the pack—he shows off his wacky and audience-pleasing antics in two second-act vignettes, “The Family That Drives Together” and “Funerals Are for Dating.”
Everything about this show is well-coordinated, from the color scheme (black, white and red in both the inventive range of costumes designed by Juliane Starks and the subtle scenic design by Dave Linfield), to the precise lighting effects and sound design by Kevin Harris, to the props by Suzy Newman (tiny red hearts woven into tennis racquets are a nice touch in one of the dating vignettes). Even bits of the book and lyrics have been coordinated to the Central Coast (CMC gets quite the showcase in “Scared Straight.”)
If the remaining shows in SLO REP’s 79th season live up to the standard this production sets, audiences are in for many treats. That SLO REP can produce this level of entertainment in its intimate and aging current facility bodes well for its future as, it is hoped, the company moves into its new, larger digs sometime in the 2026-27 season.