An attempted suicide, characters in the grip of crushing loneliness, laments on a life wasted: it doesn’t feel very Christmassy. It does, however, feel like a musical for now; festive love in a time of Covid.
There was a sense of defiance to this production opening in the second half of December. But there’s a sense of defiance to staging She Loves Me at all. Sheffield Theatres’ artistic director Robert Hastie, taking the reins, always programmes with wit and surprise. If you were going to choose a musical by Joe Masteroff (the writer of Cabaret) or Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (composer and lyricist, respectively, of Fiddler on the Roof), She Loves Me might not be the first to spring to stage. Particularly for the Christmas show, which has become a bright, tinselly affair over the past decade.
The story of a warring couple who fall in loathe-at-first-sight despite being each other’s secret penpal sweethearts first came to the stage in 1937 in Miklós László’s Parfumerie. The plot provided the basis for the 1940 James Stewart film The Shop Around the Corner, the 1949 Judy Garland musical In the Good Old Summertime and in 1998 it brought together Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail.
The accents in Hastie’s production suggest we’ve rocked up in Yorkshire, although the lack of uniformity might leave you guessing exactly where in the county. Karl Seth’s Zoltan Maraczek, the owner of the parfumerie at the heart of the plot, has a name that suggests Budapest and an accent that suggests Barnsley.
As the warring lovers who meet in Maraczek’s shop, David Thaxton and Alex Young have a charm that is neither Hanks-ian nor Garland-ian, but play the piece with a postmodern sensibility. Thaxton’s Georg Nowack has a touch of Chandler; he could quite easily have slotted into the cast of Friends, while Young’s Amalia Balash will bring Bridget Jones to mind for modern audiences. The pair find layers to their performances; this is deeper than your average romcom and while it lacks the big numbers of a My Fair Lady or Guys and Dolls, both previous Christmas shows here, it does have something to say about the sadness that can accompany the sleigh bells at this time of year.
• At the Crucible, Sheffield, until 15 January.
