In her playbill notes, director Annie Oelschlager comments on the lack of accurate fictional depictions of the booming phenomenon of courtship via computer. Accurate or otherwise, librettist-songwriter Ron Weiner's lighthearted tuner scarcely feels like a definitive dramatization of a social movement. It's a sitcom-slick relationship comedy reminiscent of the mediocre I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, pitched to the same lowest-common-denominator mass audience sensibility. Oelschlager's brisk direction and the spirited efforts of a talented ensemble aren't enough to parlay the banal material into boffo entertainment.
This is a frothy revue disguised as a book musical. Weiner's unremarkable score is dominated by melody-challenged recitative that would work more effectively as spoken dialogue. Some songs feel arbitrarily shoehorned into scenes. When the mother (Suzan Solomon) of Internet-cruising debutante Jenny (Ali Spuck) investigates the background of her daughter's new online beau, she searches the Google engine in a sassy ditty, "Google You." Inexplicably, it's about the mother's own quest for a sexual connection-at a most unlikely site for that purpose-rather than a data-gathering expedition.
Thankfully, the cast occasionally squeezes solid laughs out of predictable perils-of-cyberspace episodes: people misrepresenting their looks or identity, the expected dates-from-hell clichés, and every other dot-com dating anecdote one has heard by now. Spuck is a buoyant and appealing heroine. In multiple roles, versatile Jeffrey Landman projects an infectious comic energy, and the hilarious Reggie De Leon is at his best as an email message caught in the web of a vicious computer virus (amusingly played by Jennifer Norkin). David Eldon has good moments as the bisexual "Internet cad" Eduardo, but he needs to either maintain a consistent Hispanic dialect or drop the jarring token attempts altogether.
The efforts of music director Brian Murphy, his three-piece combo, and the choreography of Brian Paul Mendoza add occasional zest. As the evening winds down with a trite truism about the nature of dating-apparently intended as an epiphany-followed by a denouement we see coming long before it arrives, one is ready to press the delete button.
Presented by and at Art/Works Theatre, 6569 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thu.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 7 p.m. Apr. 28-Jun. 4. (323) 960-4418. www.plays411.com/internetdating.