Limonade Tous les Jours

Limonade Tous les Jours: From Lemons, Champagne

Zachary Scott Theatre Center Kleberg Stage, through March 8

Running Time: 1 hr, 30 min

Paris in the spring: Love is in the air. For playwright Charles Mee and his characters, Paris is the city of love. Where the architecture and even the layout of the streets drive people toward love. For Andrew, the slightly frumpy fiftysomething American tourist, attempting to put a recent failed relationship behind him, "Maybe this is not the place to forget about love." This is the musing of the young, vivacious cabaret singer, YaYa, who has been sent as a messenger to intersect with Andrew at a quaint Parisian cafe (are any Paris cafes not quaint?). From the moment they lay eyes on each other, it is transparent (what isn't in the City of Light?) that the two are bound to fall in love. What follows unfolds like something you'd see from the French cinema: philosophical exchanges about love and relationships and life; postcoital scenes full of philosophical exchanges about love and relationships and life; scenes in fancy restaurants, bathtubs, and boutiques full of philosophical exchanges about -- well, you know.

The play is adorably written and Zach's production adorably acted. Charles Mee is one of America's most theatrical writers, creating stage images that are rich and simple simultaneously. His imagination allows the weird and non sequitur to mix with the everyday and the natural. His flair for including the right amount of pop culture with the deepest of thoughts makes a Mee play a feast for the mind and, when the subject is love, a feast for the heart.

Jenny Larson and John Little play YaYa and Andrew, "damaged goods" both yet unable to stop growing more and more attached, despite their best intentions. Their fling becomes a relationship that defies the odds: their differences in age, in language, in culture. Larson is delightful as the chanteuse. She embodies that European air of blasé self-awareness combined with the curiosity and eagerness of a young woman with her whole (rather exciting) life ahead of her. And Little is absolutely convincing and sympathetic as he evolves from the somewhat melancholy visitor to the bemused younger-woman's lover, juggling his own mature feelings with the growing sense that here, at last, he has found something special. The delicacy (and silliness) of their growing romance is joyful in its presentation.

Mee's script calls for the use of video projections -- Andrew is supposedly a videophile, always filming. In Zach's production, there is no live action projected (the camera appeared to have broken the first time it was used), but there are buoyant sequences by Colin Lowry that show the couple having a ball at all the Paris hot spots. Lowry's background video work, however, is a distraction at best. At worst, it is a lowest-common-denominator, pseudo-art film paean to the Nude. That is hardly the story of this couple. There are other distractions, too. A pair of utility players -- waiters, supposedly -- are half in and half out of the story of the play; neither is a complete character interacting with the couple. Michael Raiford's set design includes suspended, upside-down, ugly yellow trees on a rail that creak across the stage over time. The aria sung by one of the waiter/stagehands is poorly delivered and obstructed in its staging. It feels as if director Dave Steakley has, unusually, let a few things slide. Still, Susan Branch has put gorgeous clothes on Larson that help make YaYa effervesce. And that is the grace of this production: the bubbly, intoxicating drink that is the story of this couple, pleasingly doomed to fall for each other in front of our very eyes.