Character’s Portrayal In Small-theatre Musical

Musical "I Love You" is a small-theatre musical, originally called "I Love You. You’re Perfect. Now Change " It is the most humorous and romantic love musical in broadway, only consisted of2actors and2actresses. The musical was nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award as Outstanding Off-Broadway musical in1997, and it has been translated into14languages to be performed in more than400cities over5,000times.The uncomplicated yet meaningful content stands as a characteristics of this music. With few exceptions, the scenes stand independent of the others as different stories, but indicate an overall arc to relationships throughout the course of one’s life. The stories are separate but connected by the central theme of love and relationships. For example, Story1:Mickey’s parents prepared elaborately for Mickey’s betrothal, only to be informed that they just have broken up. Story2: Petty is an extremely busy woman, barely available for dates, so she wants to go straightly to the3rd base when she first met Stan. Story3:Julie is not a pretty girl, but she fancies a hot guy. It’s the same with Jason, who is also not good looking enough. They find there is nothing to talk about when they meet, however, they are turned on by each other. Such stories are so real in life yet quite dramatic. The jumpy scenes and varied stories require that the actors and actresses would have to play different roles with various characteristics in wide age range. I wrote this essay to express my feeling and understanding of interpreting several roles in this small-theatre musical.There are4chapters in this essay:The first chapter is the outline of the play. The second stands as the analysis of the music, while the third is focusing on analysis of the script. The last chapter is about the role-interpretation. In conclusion, role-profiling&interpretation plays an important role based on the feature of small theatre musical.