Julius Thomas III and Alicia Kaori in She Loves Me.
Two people who have fallen in love through anonymous letters are dealing with one another in person much more than they know — and at first, care to know. Someone else is two-timing it between a co-worker and the boss’s wife. Another man is figuring out just how much he wants, or does not want, to meddle in all this, and another ambitious young man is just trying to get ahead. It’s all happening in the confines of a perfume shop in 1930s Budapest — and in Long Wharf’s production of She Loves Me, which had its Broadway premiere in 1963, that perfume shop is current located, quite impressively, in the transformed gym of a former middle school.
She Loves Me runs at the Lab at ConnCORP through Dec. 30.
The 1963 musical with book by Joe Masteroff, music by Jerry Bock, and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick — based on the 1937 play Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklós László, which was adapted into the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner and the 1949 musical In the Good Old Summertime — tells the story of Georg Nowack (Julius Thomas III) and Amalia Balash (Alicia Kaori), who, when the musical opens, have already been writing letters to one another for years anonymously, after one answered another’s ad in the newspaper looking for companionship.
In the way such stories are allowed one enormous coincidence to get the plot rolling, the two find themselves working in the same perfume shop.
They think they dislike each other intensely, but their co-workers, Ladislov Sipos (Danny Bolero), Steven Kodaly (Graham Stevens), and Ilona Ritter (Mariand Torres) — already see they have classic get-a-room chemistry. They are presided over by shop owner Zolton Maraczek (Raphael Nash Thompson), who has been tipped off that his wife is having an affair with one of his employees. Ilona and Steven are engaged in some tumultuous romance of their own. And delivery boy Arpad Laszlo (Felix Torres-Ponce), as much as he loves his bike, is trying to be more than a delivery boy.
What happens when Georg and Amalia discover that the person they hate in person is the person they love on paper? What happens when the various other affairs are uncovered? Each strand of this plot thickens and a few intertwine, to comic and romantic effect. As old as the source material is, it has turned out to have some staying power. She Loves Me has been successfully revived twice, in the 1990s and in 2016, and was remade into yet another movie in 1998 (the rom-com You’ve Got Mail). Long Wharf’s thoroughly charming staging of the musical makes it obvious why.
Before getting to the play itself, a note on the transformation of the space at the Lab at ConnCORP, which is so thorough that most people wouldn’t know that they were in a gymnasium. The wide open space allows for the currently fashionable setup of having seating on two sides of the stage, allowing about 200 people to fit in the space and still be close to the action. The original score for pit orchestra has been scaled down, quite effectively, to a five-person ensemble, which part of the action on the third side of the stage area. The set (Emmie Finckel, scenic designer) is largely open with a few pieces the actors can move around; this and the lighting (Jiyoung Chang, lighting designer) combine to rigorously evoke the perfume shop, a cafe, and occasionally, a few other settings. The overall effect is thoroughly transportive, Long Wharf’s most successful realization to date of its ambitions to create theater spaces all over town.
Danny Bolero, Feliz Torrez-Ponce, Graham Stevens, Mariand Torres.
In this created space, the uniformly outstanding cast fully commits to their roles. Julius Thomas III gives Georg an athletic grace as he moves across the stage, and easily conveys through expression and gesture the complex emotional ride his character takes. Alicia Kaori embues Amalia with a fierceness that, in one stroke, modernizes the story. She gives her character the intelligence and drive she needs for the audience to believe that Amalia will not be manipulated, even if Georg discovers the true extent of their relationship before she does.
Danny Bolero gives Ladislov a sly, mischievous streak that complicates his character while never leaving in doubt the sense that he’s trying to do the right thing. Felix Torres-Ponce bursts with youthful swagger and enthusiasm as Arpad Laszlo, while Raphael Nash Thompson commands the stage as an elder, unafraid to use his experience as leverage but also quick to admit when he’s wrong. As Steven Kodaly and Ilona Ritter, Graham Stevens and Mariand Torres perhaps get to have the most fun with their respective sleazeball and sex kitten roles, but both also manage to make them into human beings as well; Stevens finds the light pettiness and arrogance in his character, while Torres gives Ilona the knowing depth to make her ending up with an intellectual type later maybe not so incongruous after all.
Under Jacob G. Padrón, making his directorial debut at Long Wharf, the action moves fast, in sharp rhythm that keeps the dialogue tight and the moves from story to song seamless. Even in this more intimate production, a couple of set pieces — most notably a holiday shopping blitz in the store involving a full cast of ensemble swirling on stage in a blizzard of limbs and gift-wrapped packages — deliver the kinds of thrills only musicals can, as the stage lights up with energy and commotion, a sense of highly choreographed chaos.
The effortless triumph of She Loves Me, coming in the midst of a season of strong theater productions throughout New Haven in the past few months, is another reminder of the sheer range of possibilities for what can happen on a live stage in front of a roomful of people, no matter where it’s set up. It can provoke and challenge, and it can be quietly devastating. And sometimes, it can just feel really great.
Long Wharf Theatre’s production of She Loves Me runs at the Lab at ConnCORP, 496 Newhall St. in Hamden, through Dec. 30. Visit Long Wharf’s website for tickets and more information.