(photo credit: Joan Marcus)
The year was 1963 and the lovers of Broadway show tunes were
singing and listening to the title song from “Hello Dolly,” and “People” from
“Funny Girl,” the year’s biggest musical hits. But there was another wonderful song
– “Ice Cream” – that didn’t make the hit parade but that many people loved yet
few had the technique to sing. It was from the less popular but highly praised
musical “She Loves Me,” and sung in the show by lyric soprano Barbara Cook, who
subsequently made it her signature song. It’s too bad that more attention was not
paid to “She Loves Me,” the show that one critic rightly described as “a bonbon
of a musical.”
The bonbon is back, if not for the first time since its
premiere 53 years ago. But this time the bonbon is more like a sourball. As it
is one of my favorite musicals of all time, it grieves me to mention that the
old world charm of Budapest is totally missing from this glossy sugar and sex-coated
revival directed by Scott Ellis who also directed the same show (more beautifully
and sensitively) for the Roundabout Theater Company in 1993.
Perhaps trying hard to not repeat himself, Ellis has made
and abetted changes that do not serve or honor either the original production
or his first revival. The production in general looks, with its fanciful/whimsical
settings by David Rockwell, more like more a product out of the Disney factory.
And while this is traditionally a delicately conceived musical brimming
with luscious melodies, the sound
engineer has opted to make the singing of them sound harsh and lacking anything
close to a human. It is especially damaging to the lovely Laura Benanti who
gives a spirited performance but whose tendency for full out vibrato is done a
disservice by the electronic enhancement. At the performance I attended her
voice was shrill and piercing. and especially unpleasant in the delicate
octave-spanning aria “Ice Cream.”
This is especially saddening for those of us who love the
work as composed by Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick who bravely abandoned
the clichés of standard musical comedy writing. Of course, they were already the
recipients four years earlier of the Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Fiorello.”
For “She Loves Me” they collaborated with librettist Joe Masteroff on what many
consider as the first chamber musical comedy. If Bock and Harnick are most
famously known as the composers of “Fiddler on the Roof,” “She Loves Me” has
commanded a quiet popularity in the musical theater repertory.
Originally a play, “Parfumerie” by Hungarian Miklos Lazlo, it
is the story of two habitually sparring salesclerks working in the same Budapest
perfume shop during the Christmas season who have been anonymously courting
each other, linked by series of romantic missives. If this seems familiar, you
may recall Ernst Lubitch’s tender 1940 film “The Shop Around The Corner” with
Margaret Sullivan and James Stewart; the more robust “In the Good Old
Summertime,” with Judy Garland (1949) ; and the nicely modernized “She’s Got
Mail,” starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks (1998), all retelling the same story.
The musical, intimate by recent musical theater standards,
is designed to reveal the interior and exterior of Maraczek’s Parfumerie, a
small café and Amalia’s bedroom that looked pretty as far as it goes but
without providing a feeling for the era. Considering the song “Days Gone By,” the
costumes by Jeff Mahshie more egregiously ignored the styles of the time,
especially the kind of wardrobe likely to be worn by shop-girls.
The gorgeous Jane Krakowski, who plays the playful Ilona has
been dressed as she has been directed to further cheapen this loose-living saleslady’s already
challenged morality. And why was she given an inappropriate blonde Veronica
Lake wig with peek-a-boo bangs? It is not 1942.
“She Loves Me” was not a huge success at first, but it has
gained increasing admiration and even a cult following through the years. With
twenty three richly melodic musical numbers, almost double the usual score, a
semi-operatic framework was created where dialogue, songs and lyrics meshed delicately
into a seamless musical fabric, moving the plot effortlessly forward. In recent
years the virtually sung-through style has been expanded to the point of being almost
obligatory.
Those of us who saw the unforgettable original cast (Barbara
Cook, Daniel Massey, Barbara Baxley and Jack Cassidy) have our memories. But
the current cast has been led down a cruder path without a trace of the froth and atmospheric fragrance that should embrace the show.
As the romantically insecure yet virile Georg, Zachary Levi is appealingly reserved, that is until his Act
II encounter with the title song when falling in love becomes his catalyst for
an impressive display of unrestrained exhibitionism. I understand his cartwheel
more than the out-of-character splits that Krakowski is made to do. And while I
digress, may I add that Ilona’s crush on the two-timing in-house cad Steven
(Gavin Creel) might have worked if he had been the least bit suave instead of simply
supercilious.
A mugging to end all mugging turn by Peter Bartlett, as a
stuffy head waiter in a café singing the clever “A Romantic Atmosphere,” could
have been funny if we hadn’t seen his shtick before. Choreographer Warren
Carlyle guided the dancers predictably through the parody in which the romantic
couples suddenly turn the café into pure bedlam.
I did admire the performance by Byron Jennings as the winningly stiff-necked
parfumerie owner Mr. Maraczek who gives the schmaltzy waltz “Days Gone By” its
due. Another curious performance is given by Nicholas Barasch, as Arpad the
delivery boy who creates a character as close to a wind-up toy soldier as you
are likely to see this side of The Nutcracker. So that leaves the always
terrific Michael McGrath to be terrific once again as Sipos, the otherwise
disarming clerk whose good intentions backfire.
If it can be found, “She
Loves Me” contains stretches of romantic rapture, broad moments of hilarity and
oodles of charm, particularly the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” as sung with ever
increasing speed and anxiety by the carolers, shoppers and clerks. What I found,
however, was a lesser replication of one of the most cherished of American
musicals. P.S. I have read all the rave reviews. . . go figure.
