'She Loves Me' unrequited by a flawed script

By Boomie Aglietti

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH In 'She Loves Me,' the parfumerie is alive and well with the celebration of music.

There is one basic principle of good theater: celebrate the real. Accept my apology if this statement is merely what I wish were a bit of insight from a famous stage veteran. The production of high-quality theater requires an understanding of life's truths--emotions, attitudes, and sensitivities. In order for a production to succeed in these respects, however, the script itself must offer those who put it to life the raw material for the creation of an engaging reality. The current interpretation of the musical She Loves Me, written by Joe Masteroff, ekes out a mediocre production that lays a weak groundwork for its actors.

The central element of Masteroff's plot is actually quite intriguing, leaving the audience to guess in which direction the play will travel. Georg Nowack (Michael Walker, JE '01) and Amalia Balash (Elenna Stauffer, TD '98) are both clerks in a parfumerie; each has been writing love letters to a beloved darling never met. As it turns out, they are unknowingly writing to each other. The script loses connection with reality by speeding over the development of the couple's friendship and romance. While Georg and Amalia individually explore their personal anxieties about love in song, the play does not devote adequate time to the development of their relationship. Rather, it transforms the two from nervous single people to joyful lovers all too simplistically.

In addition, there are a few plot developments which serve no purpose, failing to contribute to any overarching theme of the play. An affair between another worker at the parfumerie and the shop owner's wife, for example, is irrelevant to the insecurities and fears of the would-be lovers. So, too, is the desire of a delivery boy to become a clerk at the parfumerie. Masteroff seems to have added these distractions in an attempt to break from the template that many of the scenes follow. Several take place in the shop, with minimal variation in tone and little progress in the development of characters' attitudes toward one another.

Not only is the writing weak, but the music fails to contribute any vitality to the script. The score, by Jerry Bock, is musically uninteresting; it is rarely evocative, settling on a modern, sitcom-like romance mood. The lyrics, written by Sheldon Harnick, often lack powerful emotional content, getting caught up in the minute and unimportant details of the play.

Given the script's limited potential, the task of bringing She Loves Me to the stage is especially difficult. Director Brian Johnson, CC '00, achieves success in examining the friendships of Georg and his co-worker Ladislav Sipos (Ethan Youngerman, SY '99) and Amalia and her co-worker Ilona Ritter (Ilyse Dobrow, SM '01). In the former, Youngerman is effective in encouraging the insecure Georg to pursue his love; in the latter, Dobrow plays Ritter's curiosity about Amalia's secret beau well. The interactions between Georg and Amalia are generally truthful, though Stauffer's portrayal commands more attention by displaying a greater breadth of feeling.

The production suffers, however, in its pacing, sometimes placing undue emphasis on background elements rather than focusing on the core of the play. Much of the first act, for example, proceeds too slowly. At one point, there are a host of interchanges inside and outside the shop that represent the changing of the seasons; they are set to music and meant to be quick. Instead, this filler, which needs only to establish the scenario, drags on at the expense of the important material. The pacing is better in the second act, imbuing the interactions between Georg and Amalia with more reality by providing sufficient time for each of the two to deal with his or her emotions.

Although the production is not a consistently strong, unified piece, it makes an effort to embellish itself for the audience to make up for the lackluster soul of the play. There are a few musical interludes with fun choreography that are appropriate to the light-hearted side of the show. In addition, the performers make good use of the comic lines that appear sporadically in the text. The performance's central problem, nevertheless, remains its inability to offer a more complex and interesting reality due to the poor resource on which it must draw.

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