SPOIL YOUR LOVE LIFE La Bohème Until 10 Mar 2013 Review by Jamie Wright Michelle Pastor certainly has talent. She’s engaging, funny, bold, charismatic and bursting with stage presence and she looks very comfortable in front of the audience. What she doesn’t quite have – yet – is the show to take all of those things and wow you with them. “Spoil Your Love Life” isn’t like a lot of the cabaret shows you’ll see – it’s not a collection of reworked pop songs strung together with stories in between but a narrative; a story about a married woman who, while locked in the bathroom, dreams about the living the life of a heroine of a mashup of nineties romantic comedies, culminating in a relationship with Hugh Jackman. There are songs, yes, but they’re between sections of monologue comparing her life to those of the women on screen. In its current form there are probably too many monologues and too few songs, and the script is repetitive and a bit light-on in terms of quality material; in particular the wedding scene, while clever and funny, goes on a bit long. But it has the potential to be great, and with some revision (and perhaps some blunt directorial input; kill your darlings and all that) it will be. Either way I suspect (and hope) we’ll be seeing more of Michelle in the future. Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)