Hungarian pastries, however delicious, rarely arrive as airy and sweet as She Loves Me, the whipped creamy musical adaptation of Miklós László’s Budapest-set 1937 play, Parfumerie. (That delightful romantic comedy also inspired The Shop Around the Corner – and, if you insist, You’ve Got Mail.) The current Roundabout revival pay loving tribute to the strength of Joe Masteroff’s book and Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock’s songs while particularly celebrating the women of the cast, Laura Benanti as the somewhat spiky Amalia and Jane Krakowski as the too soft Ilona.
Set between the wars in a small, smart cosmetics emporium (the confectionary art nouveau design is by David Rockwell), the plot of She Loves Me concerns a pair of stroppy clerks, Benanti’s Amalia and Zachary Levi’s Georg, who don’t realize they are also each other’s soppy pen pals. Meanwhile, another clerk, Gavin Creel’s Kodaly is occasionally romancing Ilona, while their unhappily married boss, Mr Maraczek (Byron Jennings), is just trying to hold himself and the shop together.
In too many musicals the music and lyrics merely echo the book or vice versa, but a great pleasure of She Loves Me is in how the songs deepen and sometimes even contradict the conversation. It’s during Vanilla Ice Cream that Amalia realizes she may actually care for Georg and it’s in the midst of She Loves Me that Georg decides that would suit him fine. Songs like Days Gone By and Grand Knowing You flesh out the more minor characters and there’s considerable appeal to the bristly patter of Where’s My Shoe? and the giddy romance of A Trip to the Library.
Under Scott Ellis’s direction, Levi’s singing and dancing are merely serviceable, but charm surrounds him like so much eau de cologne, excusing even Georg’s more reprehensible behavior. Creel makes a nicely oily Kodaly, Michael McGrath a slightly vinegary Sipos, and Nicholas Barasch is an amiable Arpad, an eager delivery boy whose great love affair is with his bicycle.
The female characters are offered far less freedom and agency than the men, who are the drivers in each of the romantic relationships and who are permitted to have goals and desires apart from the amatory. But don’t tell this to Benanti and Krakowski, who all but walk away with the show in their pert heels. Benanti’s ringing soprano makes short and lovely work of arias like Will He Like Me? and Vanilla Ice Cream and she is the rare musical theater star who is as much an actress as a singer. Krakowski is a dizzy comic presence and if she’s captivating in her solo numbers, she’s also wonderful in responding to the overtures of others, particularly Creel.
So much sugar won’t be to everyone’s taste and one could wish for less passive female roles, but this entertainment is delectable.
