Love Is Dead: A NecRomantic Musical Comedy

There’s indeed something about watching Love Is Dead that is like loving a cadaver—the pursuit indulged in by the musical’s hero, a shy mortician named Orin, until he meets the real-live woman of his dreams. The body is there, but there’s something missing inside this production of Asmus’s sharp script (the playwright  also stars as Orin), scored with gut-punching jazzy-rock songs by Nichols. Love Is Dead has the wit (one character warbles about “hap-penis”), the look, the cheek (another lyric: “the earth is gonna come when they put me inside it”) of an Annoyance lampoon down pat, but Jessup’s delivery of a Les Miz-caliber power ballad near the end made us ache for the whole show to be this way: the perfect marriage of satire and musical theater chops.

The twinge of disappointment that Love Is Dead induces is nothing that a few Fat Tires at the lobby bar can’t cure. This is the Annoyance, after all, purveyors of late-night splatter theater and incendiary spoofs, and the record holder for Chicago’s longest-running musical (surprise, kids, it’s not Wicked), Co-Ed Prison Sluts. And there are enough riotous lines in Love Is Dead to repeat for days afterward, not unlike the repetitive pleasures of any comic bits from Laurel and Hardy to Superbad. Problem is, these moments occur mostly in the songs and during scene changes between the flabbily improvised and expertly satirized. And since this isn’t a night of easygoing khaki-pants improv, Love Is Dead needs that sustained jolt of intensity to come alive.—Megan Powell