Love, they sang The Studio Repertory swoons and croons BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Love Song :A New Musical Revue Created and directed by Anthony F. DeRose and Mark D. Johnson. With Anthony F. DeRose, Matthew Gorgone, Susannah Mitchell, Hannah Van Meter, and Nate Zullinger. Presented by the Studio Repertory at the Artists’ Exchange through April 9.

Love songs are like Lego blocks — they click together into any number of combinations. That makes them perfect for a cabaret evening, and while no means a perfect example, Love Song: A New Musical Revue has some good performances as well as some little-heard songs along with the standards.

The Studio Repertory, a newly formed company, is staging the show — up close and personal, with only 24 seats — in the new Black Box Theatre at the Artists’ Exchange at 50 Rolfe Square in Cranston. Art and antiques are for sale and perusable during intermission, although you may want to spend your time complaining that more such modest performance spaces are not being tucked into back rooms around here.

You know the tradition of "you’re gonna step out on that stage, Milly Schmudlap, but you’re gonna step back a star"? Well, Broadway doesn’t beckon after a good opening night in Cranston, but the star of the show was the young Hannah Van Meter. Due to the sudden illness of veteran singer Elaine Santos, Van Meter stepped in to do Santos’s numbers as well as her own. The doubling-up made the evening a showcase for her talent, which was a continuing pleasure to behold.

The other female singer was Susannah Mitchell, whose voice and presence certainly were also up to the evening’s demands. She had fun with both "Funny Honey," from Chicago, and her other solo, "Vanilla Ice Cream," from the little seen She Loves Me. As a duet partner, she gave as good as she got from Nate Zullinger in "Love Song" from Pippin, and was quite sweet singing the gentle "Sun and Moon" )from Miss Saigon) with Matthew Gorgone.

Zullinger did well with "So In Love," from Kiss Me Kate, a Cole Porter song noticeably not witty — "so taunt me and hurt me, deceive me, desert me." (It’s also noticeable for making no specific gender reference, as though aimed toward leather bar jukeboxes. Cole, Cole, Cole.) The classic "Tonight" has bested professionals I’ve heard, so there was no surprise in its being beyond Zullinger’s vocal and acting range. Young Gorgone was more consistent, sometimes by being less vocally ambitious but not always. Singing with Van Meter, his contribution to "The Next Ten Minutes," from the musical The Last Five Years, wouldn’t have worked at all as a supplicating love song without being grounded in a firm voice as well as emotional honesty.

Between filling in and doing her own assigned songs, Van Meter sang a dozen of the 27 numbers opening night. Some of the opportunities showed off her expressive voice, its vibrato controlled and not showy. "Every Story Is a Love Story," from Aida, was a vocal challenge musically. Trickier than that, "Therapy," from Jonathan Larsen’s tick . . . tick . . . BOOM, required Gilbert & Sullivan patter-song speed. In this entertaining exchange of relationship convolutions ("I’d be afraid that you’d be afraid that I’d be afraid of . . ."), she and Gorgone had no trouble keeping up with each other. Van Meter was at her best with dramatic content, such as Mary Magdalene’s "I Don’t Know How to Love Him," from Jesus Christ Superstar. Similar emotional impact was maintained by her and Mitchell as they alternated verses of the feisty "Take Me or Leave Me," from Larsen’s fame-claiming Rent.

Unfortunately, the revue is seriously weakened by co-director Anthony DeRose, who does not have a trained voice as the others do. In Act One he limited himself to only one song, "Father’s Day" from Stephen Schwartz’s Children of Eden, to which he evidently has a sentimental attachment. But after intermission we heard from him four times. He was funny in housecoat and wig, rasping in a Harvey Fierstein voice with Gorgone, belting "You’re Timeless to Me" from Hairspray. But even though My Fair Lady’s "I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face" was written as a talk-song for Rex Harrison’s limited vocal range, DeRose couldn’t help but diminish the efforts of the others on stage by repeatedly hitting sour notes.

One of the agreeable things about musical theater is that we hear songs one note at a time. There are enough sweet ones, and enjoyable performances, in Love Song to bring a smile and swell a heart.