The Kansas City Star
“The Love List,” a romantic comedy by Canadian playwright Norm Foster, has less emotional depth than the Weather Channel on a mild day, but Foster writes crisp dialogue and has constructed his script around an entertaining, Twilight-Zonish idea.
The result is a comedy that starts slow but generates increasing laughter from a willing audience with a quirky sense of humor and offbeat plot. This is a commercial play custom-made for regional theaters, but it’s realized with a sense of style.
The American Heartland Theatre production, directed by Paul Hough, elevates the writing with a good cast. Actors Sean Grennan, Scott Cordes and Shanara Gabrielle get the most out of the material, even if their varied acting styles don’t always mesh.
Grennan, a New York-based actor familiar to Heartland audiences as both a performer and a playwright, plays a Bill, a 50-year-old divorced statistician who’s comfortable dealing with numbers but feels ill-equipped to seek female companionship.
His buddy Leon, played with consummate timing by Cordes, is an author of commercial fiction who gives Bill a unique birthday gift: Membership in a dating service. The first thing Bill must do is fill out a form listing all the attributes he wants in a mate.
Leon takes his leave, Bill nods off and before he knows it Justine, a woman he’s never seen before, swoops into his apartment with a bag of groceries ready to make dinner and be a “perfect” mate for the dumbfounded numbers-cruncher. Shanara Gabrielle, making her Heartland debut, lights up the stage with charisma, beauty and a wicked sense of comedy.
The audience figures out much sooner than Bill or Leon what’s happened. Through some strange metaphysical confluence — or, as Leon puts it, “a tear in the cosmic pie crust” — their imagined perfect woman has come to life.
Then they discover that they can alter her behavior by erasing certain qualities on the list and replacing them with others. Gabrielle is most impressive in her ability to make these leaps — from hostile to affectionate, from ambitious to lazy, from hard-nosed to sensitive — seamlessly. She has to change moods more often than she changes costumes.
Yours truly laughed out loud several times on press night, but I found myself wishing that I might see these actors in a show with a just a little meat on the bone. We must take small pleasures where we find them.
Scenic designer Alex Perry’s realization of Bill’s apartment is a nice piece of work. Not only does he vary from the Heartland’s standard template of having opposing doors at stage left and stage right, he creates a classy environment of polished steel and stained wood. Hough takes credit for the costumes, notable principally for the succession of sexy outfits worn by Gabrielle, and Shane Rowse’s lighting adds depth to the set and creates smooth scene transitions.
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/09/16/2227471/good-cast-elevates-a-shallow-script.html#ixzz0zhfRivPH
