A REVIVAL AS SWEET AS TALE’S LOVE AND ICE CREAM
By Daryl H. Miller

He says that she “must be the rudest, most difficult, worst-tempered girl in the world.” She calls him “a smug, pompous petty tyrant.” Ah, the sweet sound of two people in love.
And they are in love. With so many sparks flying, there must be heat underneath – and if that isn’t enough of a clue, there’s always the title: “She Loves Me.” The 1963 musical – source of the Barbara Cook standard “Ice Cream” and beloved by a passionate cadre of fans – returns in a can’t-wipe-this-silly-grin-off-my-face presentation by the revival specialists at REPRISE! Many things are wonderfully right about this production at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, especially the effervescence of the music as sung by Broadway sweetheart Rebecca Luker, as well as Scott Waara and Kaitlin Hopkins.

Written by composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick, the music floats along like a summer breeze, and the book by Joe Masteroff breezes along on wit and charm. So it’s hard to believe it didn’t immediately catch on.

Reviews were good for the show, with its operetta-style score helping to re-create its setting in 1930s Central Europe. But “She Loves Me” lasted for a just-OK 302 performances and closed at a loss. Perhaps its old-fashioned charms were out of step with the about-to-be-liberated ‘60s. It’s hard to say.

Still, the show was an incredible nexus of talent. It was one of the earliest directing credits for hotshot producer Harold Prince. Bock and Harnick followed it up the next year with “Fiddler on the Roof.” Masteroff went on to write 1966s “Cabaret”. And although “She Loves Me” would be Cook’s last major Broadway musical, she later moved on to a concert career and helped to keep its songs alive.

In 1993, the show got a second chance when New York’s Roundabout Theater revived it with such success that the production transferred to Broadway. Among the talents behind that staging was an up-and-coming choreographer named Rob Marshall, now nominated for an Oscar for directing “Chicago”.

In the buoyant REPRISE!! production, directed by Gordon Hunt, every details is solid, every moment confidently performed, even if a couple of minor moments of awkwardness crept into Wednesday’s opening performance.

The action takes place mostly in a cosmetics shop in an unnamed city that is, no doubt, Budapest, given that the story is based on the play “Perfumerie” by Hungarian writer Miklos Laszlo – also the source for the movies “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940), “In the Good Old Summertime” (1949) and “You’ve Got Mail” (1998).

Set designer Robert L. Smith gives the sales floor neoclassical look, gussied up in white, pink and gold. The tightly precise 13-pice orchestra, conducted by Gerald Sternbach, sits on an elevated platform behind the set.

Georg (Waara) and Amalia (Luker) are lonely-hearts pen pals who’ve never met. They connect beautifully in their letters, but they get off to a bad start when, by chance, Amalia walks into the shop where Georg works, looking for a job. Their love songs – “Tonight at Eight,” “Will He Like Me?,” “Ice Cream” and the title song – sometimes gallop along, all jittery with nerves, sometimes whisper with yearning, wrapped in hope.

Luker is wonderful in the role originated by Cook. She played another Cook role, Marian the librarian, in the recent Broadway revival of “The Music Man,” and its easy to see why she’s tapped for such assignments: She’s an approachable, everyday beauty who projects smartest-girl-in-the-class intelligence, and she sings with a focus that sends electrical currents through her shimmering soprano.

Waara, recently seen at the mark Taper Forum in “Big River,” conveys good-guy warmth even as he gives Georg just enough of a stubborn streak to set tensions buzzing between the would-be lovers. Hopkins confers glamour-girl looks and a smoky alto to the worldly salesgirl who falls for the cad played with such suave self-assurance by Damon Kirsche. And Lenny Wolpe finds brusqueness behind the store owner’s kindly exterior, driving a dark tinged subplot that results in a gunshot toward the end of the first act.

Dan Mojica’s choreography calls attention to itself only when it’s supposed to: a sexy dance among the rendezvousing patrons of the café where Georg and Amalia are supposed to meet. Mojica turns it into a lunging tango punctuated by backward dips so dramatic that the female dancers squeak with shock and excitement.

The flaws Wednesday were limited to a brief, bad sound balance that had the band overpowering the singers early in Act 2, and Luker’s Alabama accent cropping into her speaking voice now and again, putting her at odds with the Mitteleuropa milieu.
But this presentation is as tasty and comforting as the ice cream that Georg brings to Amalia, touching off that wonderful song and pointing them toward their date with destiny.

A TRIFLE TO SAVOR
Thursday, March 20, 2003

Overseas Wednesday night, the real world was fast going topsy-turvy. Inside the Freud Playhouse, within the candy-pink confines of Maraczek’s Parfumerie, circa 1930s, fictional characters smiled and twinkled, opening REPRISE!’s production of “She Loves Me” with a bouncy song called “Good Morning, Good Day.”

For the next 2 1/2 hours, the “She Loves Me” company had a roomful of theater patrons enchanted and, at least in my corner, utterly diverted. Quality entertainment can accomplish that.
“She Loves Me” – for all its fluff and inevitability – isn’t just quality, it’s delightful. Expertly cast and directed with equal parts tenderness and sunshine by Gordon Hunt, the REPRISE!! production is every bit a theatrical pick-me-up.

Even if you’ve never seen the musical, you probably know the story. A pair of perfume boutique co-workers who bicker endlessly while on the job unknowingly write each other anonymous love letters by night. The jig will be up as soon as they agree to meet in person, but book author Joe Masteroff manages to spin out of the ruse long enough to fill out a second act. Movie buffs will recognize this as roughly the same scenario of Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” as well as “In the Good Old Summertime” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

In “She Loves Me,” the lovers in question really have no lives outside their work environment and their tender correspondence. There’s no reason to believe they’re in any way right for each other beyond the fact that both are lonely and available. They meet un-cute when she maneuvers her way into a job, causing him to lose a bet. They proceed to go at each other often and consistently until the script requires they wise up.

Characters who are written solely for the purpose of being in love with each other need not necessarily be very interesting; this pair is, largely because they’re well acted. Scott Waara as Georg Nowack, the perfume store’s put-upon second-in-command, has enough of the regular-guy air about him to make us believe he’d still be single. And although Rebecca Luker simply doesn’t possess the vocal talents for sweet-singing Amalia Balash, she infuses this solitary belle with wit, verve and charisma.

Maraczek’s is a world where customers are properly fawned over and, upon their departure, serenaded with “goodbye, madam, please come again, madam. Do come again.” The staff includes slithery hunk Kodaly (Damon Kirsche) who is doing romantic injustice to fellow clerk Ilona (Kaitlin Hopkins) and also, we learn, cuckolding his boss (Lenny Wolpe). Comic relief Sipos (Larry Cedar) knows not to make waves.

The supporting roles are no more fleshed out than Georg and Amalia, but they each get to display choice samples of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s score. Here again, director Hunt is blessed with cast members who know how to make flambé out of second-banana roles. Hopkins, in full girl-Friday mode, would be the leading lady in any other production. Here she winningly backs up Luker, harmonizing in “I Don’t Know His Name,” giving off steam in the jilted-anthem solo “I Resolve” and becoming love struck again in “A Trip to the Library.”

Kirsche, a late replacement for Patrick Cassidy, is also musical theater star material. He makes Kodaly a cad, certainly, but a seductive cad who has a song in his heart. His exit anthem, “Grand Knowing You,” is a winner.

Plaudits also to Christa Jackson, Caryn E. Kaplan and Claci Miller as a trio of shop customers who also double as tryst ladies in the Café Imperiale sequence. Truly, there isn’t a frill out of place in the entire package.

And now especially, that’s kind of necessary. This “She Loves Me,” for all its romance and wistfulness over a simpler life, is a gift to cherish.

Finally, I don’t have a lot of time to do justice to, and recommend highly enough, the musical comedy “She Loves Me” – playing now through the weekend at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA. It is superb from the opening note, with a perfect cast and if you wonder why it ran less than a year on Broadway back in 1963 – join the club! Seriously, you will love She Loves Me, the REPRISE! Broadway’s Best current offering.