Don’t duet
IF YOU just watch the dance numbers i n “Lovestruck: The Musical,” you could have some fun.
If you leave on the sound to hear the story, too, you’re taking your chance. You may be disap - pointed. Or maybe just puzzled.
Jane Seymour, in which will ultimately not be her defining career role, plays Harper, who was once the next big dancer on Broadway until she hurt her knee and became a star choreographer.
Her daughter, Mirabella (Sara Paxton), is now starring in Harper’s next show. Except Mirabella doesn’t have the all-consuming need to dance, and when she meets Marco (Alexander DiPersia), a rich playboy who swears Mirabella will make him a one-woman man, she decides to quit the show and marry him.
Harper immediately moves to torpedo this reckless bailout by flying to the wedding in Italy. So far, okay. Then, when Har per gets to It a ly, she drinks an elixir that makes her 30 years younger (enabling her to suddenly be played by Chelsea Kane).
Good for Harper, who can dance again. Not so good for the viewer, who watches the plot disintegrate into a string of wellworn homilies, predictable epiphanies and time-travel contortions.
That includes Har per meeting her ex (played by Tom Wopat), who, it turns out, has an explanation for why he cheated on her. It was her fault because she was so busy working and she was a star and he was “the guy holding your coat at parties.”
If she’d just forgotten about this dancing nonsense and stayed in the kitchen, all this never would have happened.
Anyhow, the movie eventually sorts it all out, more or less. But the better reason to watch “Lovestruck” remains the dancing, which includes a bikini number, some Fred-and-Ginger vocal duets between Paxton and DiPersia, and spontaneous group breakouts in airports and at weddings.
Call it Sunday night fever.