Paper Mill Playhouse offers this little gem with a script that is funny, intelligent, honest and sentimental.
By: Stuart Duncan
The 1962-63 Broadway season was a disaster for American musicals. Variety, the show-biz newspaper, tabulates each season with a list of "hits" and "flops." The judgment is wholly on mercenary grounds: If a show has fully returned its original investment, it is deemed a hit, if not, it’s a flop.
In the ’62-’63 season not a single American musical paid its investors back. By contrast, three British musicals Beyond the Fringe; Stop the World, I Want to Get Off and Oliver were called hits. But Tovarich with Vivien Leigh; Little Me with Sid Caesar; Mr. President with Nanette Fabray and a score by Irving Berlin; and She Loves Me failed to make the grade. In the intervening years, however, She Loves Me has gathered a loyal cult of adoring fans and this, in turn, has led to productions seldom seen with Broadway failures. The latest staging is at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn and it is as charming and entertaining an evening as you are going to find.
The story, you may remember, is based on two classic MGM movies The Shop Around the Corner with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and In the Good Old Summertime with Van Johnson and Judy Garland. It tells the story of two clerks in a fancy parfumerie in Budapest who discover they are each other’s anonymous and amorous pen pals. It is one of those rare show scripts that is funny, intelligent, honest and sentimental.
The Paper Mill mounting is superb. Director James Brennan who is as well-known as an actor (Me and My Girl, for example) as he is as a director has assembled a truly extraordinary company.
Let’s begin with Michelle Ragusa and George Dvorsky, since they play the pair of lonely clerks who fall in love through the mail. She is a newcomer to Paper Mill, a just-beyond-ingenue gal with a lovely voice to match honest acting talents. He has done shows in Millburn such as 1776 and Shenandoah, plus the title role in Broadway’s The Scarlet Pimpernel. Their on-stage chemistry is apparent and terrific.
There are some other old-timers in the company: George S. Irving, for example, plays the owner of the elegant shop, just the latest in a long line of Paper Mill triumphs through the years. At age 82, he can look back at his opening night on Broadway in Oklahoma. Steven Hess has a wonderful time as the show’s number one cad and Bradford William Anderson goes from teenager to adult before our eyes as Arpad, the delivery boy with visions of upward mobility. Nancy Anderson (no relation) has just plain fun as the shop girl who finds love in the stacks at the library. Incidentally, she spent last season on Broadway, playing both leads in Wonderful Town.
And, just when the show might sag toward the end of a longish first act, along comes Paul Schoeffler and a host of the company’s best dancers to introduce us to a night club with "a romantic atmosphere." He has played Henry Higgins at Paper Mill, but here just plain grabs the evening’s biggest laughs and steals the show in a single scene.
Michael Anania’s set design is unusually mobile and elegant, and is beautifully lit by F. Mitchell Dana. Incidentally, on opening weekend in Millburn, book writer Joe Masteroff showed up, plus Jerry Bock, who wrote the music, and Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the lyrics. See what happens when audiences just won’t give up on a little gem.
She Loves Me continues at Paper Mill Playhouse, Brookside Drive, Millburn, through Dec. 5. Performances: Wed., Fri. 8 p.m.; Thurs. 2, 8 p.m.; Sat. 2:30, 8 p.m.; Sun. 2, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $31-$68; $16 student rush the day of the performance. For information, call (973) 376-4343.