‘I Love You Because’ feels like incomplete sentence
“I Love You Because,” at Spring Street Studios through Sunday, is about as memorable and distinctive as its title.
It aims to be a Jane Austen tribute, a parody of romcom tropes and an inspirational story about learning to love outside of your comfort zone. The musical was written by Ryan Cunningham (book and lyrics) and Joshua Salzman (music) in 2006, which feels like centuries ago, and not just because the storyline features a liberal falling in love with a conservative without them first tearing each other to shreds.
Reeking of stereotype, the story follows Jeff Bennett ( Justin White), a dude getting over his ex-girlfriend, and Marcy Fitzwilliams (Chelsea Ryan McCurdy), a girl getting over her ex-boyfriend. Ignore their names: “Pride and Prejudice” fans have little to obsess over here. At the behest of Jeff ’s brother and Marcy’s best friend, they decide to use each other as rebounds, but — surprise — accidentally fall in love.
The setup is cynical, the plot is factory-made and the resolution difficult to believe. The self-conscious and parodic song “But I Don’t Want to Talk About Her” works strikingly well as a buoyant piece of self-criticism of our unlikeable protagonists. But the other songs fail to rise out of the ordinary.
Staged by the new theater company Rogue Productions, the local production is directed by company co-founder Rachael Logue, and stars co-founder McCurdy. McCurdy is terrific. Even without a working mic, her voice filled the Spring Street black-box space. Even if you don’t feel her, you hear her. And she sounds fantastic. But she didn’t get enough spotlight moments to give the show the overall power it needed.
The production, by the way, is littered with brightly colored but misplaced artistic choices. Objects transform from literal two-dimensional cardboard cutouts to 3-D props. Costumes change color over time. But it’s never clear why a “Blue’s Clues” aesthetic is needed. Outside of an approximation of the musical’s message to “live a colorful, three-dimensional life,” there isn’t a reason.
The two couples in the musical start off wearing different colors and gradually end up wearing identical outfits. He was blue, she was pink. They end up purple. But this isn’t what the musical wants to say about people falling in love — the text doesn’t want its characters to conform, assimilate or erase difference, but rather celebrate the so-called “unique” characteristics, such as drinking coffee black, that they bear.
And why is a twodimensional liquor bottle all of a sudden a real one? Sometimes a drink is just
a drink. Sometimes what comes after the sentence “I love you because” doesn’t have to be clever and poetic and flirtatious all at once because you end up saying nothing at all. Jeff ’s day job is writing lovely phrases on Hallmark cards (just like the equally generic white male protagonist of the 2009 film “500 Days of Summer”), but he wants a romance that doesn’t feel cut from cardboard.
Too bad the characters in “I Love You Because” lack the specificity he craves. By the time the characters sing the final song, which I can’t remember at all, everyone wears the same clothes. Like the pigs and the men at the end of “Animal Farm,” they’re utterly indistinguishable, yet with none of the biting irony. In other words, “I Love You Because” ends up feeling like a halfcomplete sentence.