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 Lubitsch’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. Both look 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 ignore 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 apparently been directed) to further cheapen this loose-living saleslady’s already challenged morality. And why is 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 23 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 work if he were 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 do 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. But another curious performance is given by Nicholas Barasch as Arpad the delivery boy; he 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. Still, this is a lesser replication of one of the most cherished of American musicals. P.S. I have read all the rave reviews. . . go figure.
