SNIFFING OUT A BRITISH ACCENT!
SCARLETT STRALLEN was rehearsing a number called Dear Friend, from the musical She Loves Me.
The song, in her clear soprano voice, sounded familiar to me — but different, too.
Mark Umbers, one of the show’s leading men, volunteered that it might be because it was being performed in a British accent.
Well, obviously, I thought. Then director Matthew White explained that the last London production, 20 years ago, which starred Ruthie Henshall and John Gordon Sinclair, was based on a U.S. version. ‘They were directed to act in American: with an American accent,’ he said.
‘This is set in Budapest!’ White exclaimed. ‘So there’s no reason to do an American accent.’
So White decided his cast at the Menier Chocolate Factory would not only do it in English, they would do it with regional accents.
One lad — 17-year-old Callum Scott Howells, who ended up landing the part of the delivery boy — was asked to sing in his own voice during rehearsals. ‘He did it in broad Welsh: and it just worked brilliantly!’ White recalled
‘It feels more honest,’ agreed Strallen. She plays Amalia Balash: the shop assistant at the parfumerie in Budapest who begins an epistolary romance with an unknown sweetheart who might be closer than she thinks.
Katherine Kingsley, playing Ilone Ritter, a woman whose glamour masks her loneliness, thinks using regional accents also introduced a sense of class difference.
She has been practising with co-star Dominic Tighe. ‘Our characters are in love at the start; and then it gets a bit icky,’ she laughed. She and Tighe are a reallife married couple, by the way.
She Loves Me, with music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and a book by Joe Masteroff (based on Miklos Laszlo’s play) is perhaps best known for a number Amalia sings called Vanilla Ice Cream: a gift for a soprano like Strallen.
David Babani, the Menier’s artistic director, said he was told Masteroff was loathe to write the show, back in the Sixties, unless he could mine the dark side, as well as the light. ‘He didn’t want it to become a comic frippery,’ Babani told me. ‘It’s about real people, in real situations.’
Watching rehearsals, I’d say White has got the balance just about right. But he won’t know for sure until it’s in front of its first audience on November 25. To my mind, She Loves Me is like being enveloped in a warm embrace.
The company also includes Les Dennis, as perfume shop owner Mr Maraczek; Olivia Fines (a star of the future); Vincent Pirillo; and Luke Fetherston — who was in the Menier and Savoy Theatre production of Funny Girl.