Theatre review: Musical examines romance through lens of reality TV

A new musical from mother-daughter team Sara and Reena Kreindler sets out to observe whether it always takes a fool to rush in.

Anita Stephen (Carlyn Graff-Czehryn) is an emerging Winnipeg anthropologist who, in high school, may have considered pasting the inner door of her locker with excerpts from Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa — better that she should study courtship rituals while trapped inside it.

That was then, this is now: Stephen — named in a nod to Sondheim by playwright, lyricist and composer Sara Kreindler — travels to a distant island location to study the modern phenomenon of the reality show The Perfect Man.

Hosted by Jerry Cole (Chase Winnicky), a former nature doc narrator, the show-within-the-show isn’t set in Mead’s 1928 but instead in an ever-present now. The characters are but one post-high school of fish in an endless stream of televised depictions of “real love.”

Stephen believes she’s been invited to the island by the showrunners to do her life’s work, which might “increase the show’s stature as a cultural icon.” She intends to gain understanding through qualitative and quantitative research, conducted at a distance from her observation group; this scientist is not here to be anybody’s baby.

But instead, without ever signing any sort of release, the anthropologist is added to the roster of contestants (Kelly Benzing, Alexandra Chubaty Boychuk, Haeln Gebre, Sam Hutchings and Jasmine Wallace) who have already arrived in competition for Clayton’s (Reid McTavish) dreamy, drifting eye.

Directed by Sharon Bajer, this co-production of the Winnipeg Studio Theatre and the Gargoyle Theatre Players places the audience in the context of the TV audience, playing on the tendency of viewers to form alliances with the reality television competitors they meet each week for superficial group dates in the sunshine.

It’s just Me and You and the Camera Crew, Clayton sings to the bachelorettes, who appear in effective confessional asides on a mounted television screen beside the stage. Inside the Kreindlers’ frame, the picture is moving but never askew: its contents are meme-coded and deeper than many of Mead’s ethnographical conclusions.

Some contestants might just be here for the ziplining, while others are mentally browsing the ring display cases at Appelt’s.

Though textually rewarding, most importantly The Perfect Man is richly entertaining, with the all-local original cast meeting the standard set high by the book.

Graff-Czehryn is excellent as Stephen, who moves from detached to engaged as she re-encounters rigidly assumed high school dynamics — as a participant this time around.

The entire cast is game for the musical’s palate of silliness, bittersweetness and desire. There are well-rounded and cutting performances by McTavish and Hutchings, whose salsa instructor Stephanie wriggles her way into the love polyhedron. As Cole, Winnicky gives perhaps his finest professional onstage performance yet.

Gebre’s Sandra Dee-ish Reese, Wallace’s ditzy Danielle, and Chubaty-Boychuk’s uplifting Carol make the most of their supporting roles, which by show’s end mostly receive payoffs that effectively subvert expectation; Reese’s spoken line about shared space with women rings very differently when the characters finally leave the island.

Each character aims to be viewed more clearly — by themselves, by each other and by their romantic mightabeens — for who they truly are; this pursuit has long existed in storytelling, but only the past half-century’s contestants have had to compete in an arena defined by televised beauty pageants, horse races, boxing matches and final roses.

From the song’s opening number — Meet Your Match — through to its expert yenta Miroslava (Benzing, also very funny as the sneeziest resident of The Perfect Man-Sion), The Perfect Man is always in conversation with its comedic and melodic ancestors, including Fiddler on the Roof.

The humane action unfolds at the Gargoyle, with the performers routinely experimenting with the use of the venue’s aisle-to-stage access routes.

With Bajer’s direction and Victoria Exconde’s choreography, these wayfinding choices are mostly well-deployed as a reference for the performers’ re-entry into audience’s view. However typical to the reality format, these comings and goings can lose their lustre if relied upon too frequently for a brief hit of surprise.

The Kreindlers’ astute skewering of, and tribute to, what’s now become a dominant art form — read Pulitzer winner Emily Nussbaum’s sprawling reality television history, Cue The Sun, for a book-length argument accounting for both The Truman Show and The Hills’ Lauren Conrad — the creative team suggests that humans have muddled our courtship rituals under the influence of unrealistic media depictions.

A reality TV rose can be just as thorny as a balladic, bent-knee proposal, Kreindler asserts: might a bird know better than even the most educated fleas about the give and take of love?

When a penguin in an icy climate thinks of his future, we learn in this première, he delivers a small stone to his prospective partner. What the writers here leave to our own interpretation is the meaning of the exchange.

According to the BBC’s Discover Wildlife website, several varieties of penguin rely on those gifts to raise their nesting eggs and protect them from the bitter cold of permafrost.

You don’t have to lose sight of the promise of pebbles in pursuit of the glimmer of shimmering stones.

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