I smell a hit for the perfume lovebirds
She Loves Me (Menier Chocolate Factory) Verdict: Heaven scent
HAD Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick written She Loves Me a decade earlier, it might have become a world-beater. The show reached Broadway in 1963 just as The Beatles were about to wow the world with the similarly named She Loves You. Bock’s musical about a shy shopgirl finding love in old Budapest looked rather dated by comparison.
Who cares? A new production at the Menier Chocolate Factory is heavenly: easy on eye and ear, ripe in sentimentalism and (with its penultimate song about Christmas shopping) perfect for the season. The score is played skittishly by the Menier’s eight-piece band, the songs are blown forth at full throttle and the comic acting is similarly top-notch.
Scarlett Strallen, whose voice could be Julie Andrews on steroids, plays adequately pretty Amalia (she is told she will never win beauty contests but she’ll do).
Yearning for a mate, she has fallen in love with an anonymous pen pal, ‘Dear Friend’.
What neither she nor ‘Dear Friend’ knows is that they work together at a parfumerie, where he is her boss — and in reality they can barely stand one another.
This plot, from a Hungarian play, was also the basis for the film You’ve Got Mail. Director Matthew White has assembled a terrific cast: Mark Umbers as Amalia’s unwitting admirer Georg, Dominic Tighe as a more caddish shop assistant and Katherine Kingsley (in real life Mrs Tighe) superbly funny as the cad’s statuesque lover, Ilona.
‘Are you happy alone, Ilona?’ goes a typically delicious line from lyricist Harnick.
As I was watching it and floating towards a blissful cloud, I noticed that an old gent directly in front of me was so thrilled by the show that he was weeping, tears sneaking out of his wrinkling right eye.
The Menier’s intimate stage has been souped up with four small revolves, enabling quick scene changes from the exterior to the exquisite interior of Maraczek’s scent shop. Paul Farnsworth’s set also gives us a grand restaurant where Amalia goes to meet ‘Dear Friend’.
Cue a corking vignette from Cory English as the head waiter (his part will be taken by Norman Pace later in this four-month run).
GooD old Les Dennis, though no Caruso, plays the parfumerie owner Maraczek, who has love woes of his own.
To some extent, it is a romantic version of Are You Being Served?, Miss Kingsley’s delivery of A Trip To The Library worthy of any comedy anthology. Schmaltz is repeatedly avoided by the witty lyrics. Miss Strallen makes Amalia a judicious mix of sparkle and girl-next-door reliability, establishing a saleable chemistry with rangy Mr Umbers.
There are some almost balletic dance routines, the ensemble doing well to convey the mounting frenzy of Christmas shoppers.
You could never accuse She Loves Me of tackling the great existential knots of our era, though its core codes of love, aspiration and ‘never lose your job’ do it for me.
At the end of this enchanting show, as the panting cast took well-deserved bows, the old man sitting in front of me was hauled onstage.
He was Sheldon Harnick, aged 92, and he declared it possibly the best production of She Loves Me he’d ever seen.