Within the first year of its inception, HappenStance Productions has found a home base at Andiamo Novi’s upstairs theater. Now the company brings its latest in a string of musicals, Five Course Love (book, music, and lyrics by Gregg Coffin), a bodice-ripper of an international buffet. Under the direction of Aaron T. Moore, this production plays up the campy, soapy humor of its premise and embraces the addictive appeal of the empty calorie, to delectably tawdry effect.
There’s rhyme and reason behind the paperback book each woman character (all played by Maren Ritter) is reading when we first meet her, but the production wisely drops the through line like a hot potato, giving each of the musical’s five distinct vignettes an agreeably self-contained feel. The scenes, all featuring a woman, a man (Patrick O’Reilly), and a facilitating waiter (Moore), tell stories of first meetings, infidelity, betrayal, and fighting for love; what they have in common is their passionate themes, their restaurant settings, and their unabashed unreality. Befitting a handful of silly capers, the actors play to the audience at every available opportunity, giving the show a cabaret feel ideally suited to the utter absurdity of these pulpy escapades.
Unconcerned with realism or excessive precision, the performances are above all fun and full of energy, moving along fluffy subject matter and helping excuse a number of lazily scripted stereotypes. All three actors find versatility within their consistent goofiness, lending coherence to the production even as they play each beat with distinction. Ritter runs the gamut from a pop-eyed plaything to an uninhibited temple of promiscuity who gets less impressed with more experience. Raging self-satisfaction is a consistent highlight of O’Reilly’s character work, more often than not just as funny as the fall that his pride all but makes certain. Moore’s performance deepens as his characters move from background to foreground, shifting from exacting gestures and inflections to increasingly bombastic choices. Teamwork is implicit, but not explicit, given the choice to pander to the audience in favor of interacting; however, there is little enough real substance that the viewer is unlikely to be left missing that connection.
The action unfolds on a representative but largely blank setting, with exceptional accompanist Matthew Kulbacki almost forgotten in an upstage nook on a plane with the neutral wait station and neutral kitchen door. True to the way the material is played, the lighting is blithely unconcerned with naturalism, smashing from full illumination to sultry solo effects the moment the actors hits their marks. In the often noise-polluted Andiamo Novi performance space, the primarily unobtrusive sound design is at least two-thirds effective: overhead microphones suffice for two of the performers, a method that proves far more pleasant than the spotty individual amplification employed for the third. Even so, the occasional staticky moment is ignored and proves fleeting; if anything, it highlights what an otherwise clear and capable presentation this blend of instrumentals and lyrics is.
For a company attempting to bridge artistic pursuit to entertainment venue, Five Course Love seems an excellent fit for this HappenStance endeavor. Tossing a dash of play in with its revue mindset, this production layers plentiful humor and just enough substance onto its grab-bag catalog of tunes. At a wild and wandering eighty-some minutes, this is a whopper of a sampler plate with appeal for every taste, including an unexpected little grace note of a late-game reveal designed to satiate in its cohesion. Viewers who like their evening entertainment broad and bawdy will not be disappointed, nor will those who crave resolution be left hanging indefinitely.