“She Loves Me” at the Long Wharf Theatre
Robert Schneider in New Haven, Connecticut
14 December 2024
Our not knowing makes everyone more attractive. We see someone at a bus stop or in a café; we don’t know their name or anything about them and, in our ignorance, we can easily imagine them as a potential romantic partner. In the absence of information, we find passers-by desirable. We know what they look like and how they move; that’s enough. We can fill in whatever details we like from imagination. This particular fountain of romance is severely threatened in the information age: it’s become possible to find a great many details about anybody with just a few clicks. We have become Googleable to each other. The tender fantasies we create about strangers perish in a hailstorm of hard fact before they can blossom into romance.
Miklos Laszlo’s 1937 play Parfumerie inverts this situation. It tells the story of two pen-pals who elevate correspondence to the level of spiritual union. They know all about each other’s soul because they send and receive long intimate letters, but they’ve never met or even exchanged photographs. It’s a different kind of not knowing, but once again imagination fills in the details. Each cherishes a notion of what their dear friend looks like, but they don’t really know. They don’t need to know. The big coincidence at the heart of Laszlo’s comedy is that, unbeknown to each, the two epistolary lovers work in the same perfume shop where they quarrel constantly.
Laszlo left Budapest for New York in 1938 but Parfumerie went further, landing in Hollywood where Ernst Lubitsch turned it into The Shop Around the Corner (1940) with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. The California sun subsequently saw it ripen into In the Good Old Summertime (1949) with Judy Garland and Van Johnson and, finally, Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1993) with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
But the theatre wasn’t finished with Parfumerie. In 1963, Hal Prince brought it to Broadway as a full musical called She Loves Me with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. The book was by Joe Masteroff, who would write the book to Cabaret two years later.
The current revival of She Loves Me at the Long Wharf makes much of the Masteroff connection and attempting to find dark portents of Cabaret’s pre-war Berlin in the frothy Budapest of the earlier musical. The programme quotes a Britannica article to inform us that Hungary between the wars experienced “exacerbated frictions between identity and nationality, self-determination and assimilation, and individually and collectively held pasts, presents and futures”—implying that Budapest in 1937 can provide a distant mirror of modern-day America. There may very well be parallels, but I don’t see any in this iteration of She Loves Me which is as sweet as an Esterházy torte served with a side of Schlagsahne.
Indeed, pastry comparisons have marked the piece’s critical reception ever since Howard Taubman likened the original production to a dobos torta.
To judge only from Laszlo’s play—without consulting Britannia—Hungarians in 1937 didn’t know they were living between the wars. The phrase meant nothing to them. They thought they were living in a post-war period which only later turned out to be a pre-war period. Also, to judge by the play, they liked their entertainments light and frothy. What’s more, they would have loved the Long Wharf production, as anybody with a sweet tooth would.
In 2022, the Long Wharf Theatre moved out of the space on Long Wharf drive where it was born in 1965 and had lived ever since. Stricken by covid and the hard facts of real estate, the company decided to ‘take theatre to the community’ and ‘activate’ new performance spaces all around town. She Loves Me activates the Community Economic Impact Lab, a centre for promoting minority entrepreneurship which itself reactivated (and expensively re-configured) a former Middle School in Hamden. The Lab and the Long Wharf have effected a lavish transformation of what used to be the school gymnasium. Only the basketball goals folded under the roof trusses betray the room’s original purpose. Scenic designer Emmie Finckel has created an alley space mid-court with a beautiful faux-tiled floor which serves to centre the perfume shop and the romantic café where the pen pals attempt their first, flesh-and-blood meeting. The audience is grouped under the baskets, facing itself.
Director Jacob G. Padrón has assembled a charming, utterly winning, multi-ethnic cast, all Broadway veterans, whose talent explodes in this intimate space.
Alicia Kaori and Julius Thomas III play the lovers-by-correspondence who attempt to outdo each other in devotion to their unseen partner even as they quarrel in the here-and-now. Kaori and Thomas make credible the most delicate moments in Laszlo’s story, the moment for each of them when knowing replaces not knowing. It’s by no means easy for either character; they have to swallow their fantasies and fall in love for real. They each get a supremely challenging song to do it. Thomas sings ‘She Loves Me’ and Kaori marvels over the mystery of ‘Vanilla Ice Cream,’ a song that Barbara Cook made famous in the original production.
As the owner of the parfumerie, Raphael Nash Thompson does a bitter-sweet turn which, in alley staging, amounts to inviting the whole audience to dance with him. We want to join in!
Felix Torrez-Ponce is perfect as the delivery boy who wants to be a sales clerk. Graham Stevens secretes bile as the treacherous colleague who wants to run the whole shop. They all seem like people we’ve met someplace or might meet tomorrow.
But in all of this, there’s no hint of impending catastrophe. This perfume shop is as light as chocolate-cream-filled rigó jancsi despite Padrone’s stated intention to produce undertones of a brooding, canker-stricken Kit Kat Klub.
If there’s a dark side to this affair, it’s that it reminds us of a time before big-box stores when being a retail clerk was a profession that required expert knowledge of both products and customers. A job in retail entailed esprit de corps, pride in the workplace, and genuine prestige for sales clerks who could do it well. It’s been a quite a while since we could count on such things in any shopping trip.
Bubbling up in the froth of the Long Wharf’s production of She Loves Me is a hymn to working people and their craft. What came crashing down on the world of this play wasn’t the Nazis, it was Costco, Walmart and the unspeakable effrontery of asking clients to push their own caddies.
