Theatre: What’s Love Got to do With It (★★★)

The Cutting Room Floor
Directed by Rachael Woodward
Designed by Olivia Tartaglia
Devised and performed by Tristan Balz, Jacinta Larcombe, Mariah O’Dea, Zoe Hollyoak, Tristan McInnes, Phoebe Sullivan
Blue Room Theatre
Until June 25

The highlight of TILT, the WAAPA Performance Making course’s final showcase last year, was a button-bright boardroom satire about love, heartbreak and how those maladies might be ameliorated, or cured completely, by pharmaceutical means. 
It was a killer idea that, with just the merest tweaking, could go into the Fringe or a Blue Room season with “sold out” written all over it.
In retrospect, “merest tweaking” was a bit optimistic.
Morphing a show from a 20-minute-long skit into a 50-minute-long play isn’t simply a matter of adding more of the same.
It requires wholly new elements; plot and character development, a genuine narrative arc, action and reaction, a twist or two – just about everything that a skit can do without but a play must have.
What’s Love Got To Do With It hasn’t yet completely found its feet (if anything, the storyline was not as clear as it was in the shorter version) but there’s more than enough wiz and bang on show to thrill its audience.
And, maybe, get some “sold out” signs up at the Blue Room. 

Read the complete review in The West Australian.