I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change

If this show were a blind date, you’d feel relieved, grateful and pleasantly surprised.

—Newsday, 1996

In 1995, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change premiered at the American Stage Company in New Jersey, where another small musical phenomenon, Forever Plaid, had made its debut years before. In the middle of one early performance, a woman in the audience shouted out, “This is my life!” and the creators were certain they were on to something. The following season, I Love You...moved to New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater, and then in August 1996 it opened Off Broadway at The Westside Theater, where it played for 12 years and 5,003 performances, finally closing last July. The show has now been seen on five continents in more than 500 cities, including London, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg and Sydney. It has been translated into 12 languages; actors from Shanghai performed it in Mandarin in rep with the New York cast for two months. In addition to its enormous success, the Off Broadway production has been the site of 50 marriage proposals, all of which resulted in yeses. No word on how long those engagements lasted.

A sort of slalom course on male-female relationships, the musical began as a series of non-musical vignettes called Love Lemmings, written by Joe Di Pietro. The original director put him in touch with Jimmy Roberts who added the score.

Both men attribute the show’s longevity to the late Jamie Hammerstein’s vested interest in developing I Love You...into the hit it became. Son of legendary lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, James Hammerstein produced the show, shepherding it through its regional tryouts, its first, financially rough year in New York, and into the phenomenon it became. Mr. Hammerstein asked to sum I Love You...up, offered: “It’s about the horrible experience of love and how we keep coming back for more. It’s an affirmation.”