Romance is a dish best served hot. The Denver Center’s “Five Course Love” is a musical-comedy dish that’s served . . . kind of lukewarm.
Written with built-in date-night appeal, this newest offering at the Galleria Theatre is a breezy series of five manic mini-musicals, each set in a different theme restaurant. Three hardworking actors perform each of these separate stories like short, blue-collar comic operettas, with exaggerated characters and heightened situations that play out through song lyrics.
Every 15 minutes we move from an all-you-can-eat Texas barbecue to a mob-run Italian restaurant to a German sausage house to a Mexican cantina to a ’50s diner. Each locale brings a new romantic conflict between stock comic characters such as a nerd being stood up for a blind date, or a Jersey mob princess cheating on her goombah.
That makes for a novel concept for a musical, yet, strangely, it never manages to not feel derivative and curiously dated.
The joy of the evening comes from simply appreciating the efforts of quick-changing and hardworking actors Sarah Rex, Daniel Langhoff and Jordan Leigh (who plays a different waiter in all five scenes). It’s fun to watch their comedic and vocal dexterity, such as Rex morphing from a country Barbie intent on finding her Ken, to a German dominatrix. The woman can hold a note — and a whip. The songs are pleasant and written in a traditional musical style that, perhaps intentionally, sound like homages to something else: There’s the “Little Shop” song, the “Man of La Mancha song,” the “Grease” song, etc.
The costumes are a hoot. The live three-piece combo switches hats to fit the musical style of the moment, such as sombreros or Alpine hats.
It’s all very fun. It’s just not all that funny. And watching gifted comic actors working overtime to make you laugh at bits that just aren’t all that laughable gets awkward. Leigh made physical comedy look effortless while starring in “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” on this same stage for more than four years. He’s a funny guy, but this time around he’s not given enough to work with.
It’s the anachronistic tone of the musical that’s most irreconcilable. It’s billed as a kind of sentimental homage to “The Carol Burnett Show,” but while each story is loaded with madcap physical comedy, they don’t play out with the same kind of smart heart.
And through most of the night, Cupid’s arrow is about as accurate as Tiger Woods on a late-night Escalade drive. As each scene zips by, you start to wonder what it is we’re really doing here. What’s the thread that links these five disparate tales? Turns out there is one — and it’s a good one — but by then, it’s too late for us to much care.
Comparisons to the record-breaking “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” are inevitable (I overheard two separate couples doing just that). And by that score, “Five Course Love” comes up several courses short. Perhaps the difference is that the “LPC” characters — like the young parents who are too tired to have sex — were so recognizable to anyone watching, while “5CL” paints its characters in such broad, cartoonish strokes, it’s hard to take them seriously. The closest we come to truly relating is when a waitress named Rosalinda must choose between two lovers — a passionate gunslinger and a hand-holding romantic.
“Five Course Love” is a perfectly pleasant short night out that will leave departing couples holding hands and smiling. Just know it has the nutritional value of a dime-store strawberry shake with whipped cream and a cherry on top.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Five Course Love” **1/2 (out of four stars)
Musical sketch comedy. Galleria Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex. Written by Gregg Coffin. Directed by Ray Roderick. Through June 19. 85 minutes with no intermission. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. $25-$40. 303-893-4100,
