Arts Listings

A chain of successes transformed a Hungarian play, Parfumerie, into an Ernst Lubitsch film, 1940’s Shop Around the Corner (with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan), then the 1949 Judy Garland vehicle, In the Good Old Summertime, before becoming a 1963 Harold Prince Broadway hit, She Loves Me, and finally You’ve Got Mail on the screen in 1998. 

And the Masquers Playhouse in Point Richmond keeps the chain unbroken with a success of its own, its current production of She Loves Me. Originally created by Fiddler on the Roof team Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, with book by Cabaret’s Joe Masteroff, such a slew of successful predecessors have variously enabled the sprightly cast assembled under Marti Baer’s direction to take wing. Making the most of their material, they bring both the enthusiasm of community theater and the skill it takes to pull out the stops to this nostalgic musical comedy, providing the audience with a doubly entertaining evening.  

The story revolves around the employees of a perfume shop in Budapest, entre les deux guerres, their various eccentricities and love lives. Steven Kodaly (D. C. Scarpelli) is a smooth, mustachioed ladykiller, with bubbly ingenue Ilona Ritter (nimble, funny Alison Peltz) seemingly under his thumb—though Ilona’s miffed over Kodaly’s slipperiness and excuses. Maraczek, the owner (Larry Schrupp), harkens back to his own bachelorhood, while swearing fidelity to his only dancing partner, his wife. Georg Nowack, head clerk (Coley Grundman) confides to gentle non-interventionist Ladislov Sipos (Alex Shafer) that he has a secret romance with Dear Friend—a pen pal he’s never met. And Arpad, the enthusiastic delivery boy (Peter Budinger), just seems to be in love with his bicycle.  

Into the busy shop wanders Amalia Balash (Jacqueline Andersen and Robin Steeves alternating), looking for a job, which she scores on a challenge, acing an impossible cold sale that decides a side bet between Maraczek and Georg. 

Amalia becomes the shop’s top seller—and she and Georg start sniping at each other, unaware that they share something very much in common. And Georg finds himself inexplicably on Maraczek’s bad side, so skirmishing on two fronts. 

The split between the smiling, uncomplicated look that the clerks show their many customers and the tangle of their private lives and gossip is the comic back-and-forth that drives the play, bursting out in spirited, burlesqued production numbers on the sales floor, amusingly telegraphed in an escalating Christmas rush. More private moments are upstaged by the buzz of the shop, or in a show-stopping series of hilarious encounters in one of Budapest’s famed cafes (where humorous head waiter Robert Love, the Masquer’s managing director, strives in vain to keep a romantic atmosphere, with gypsy wildness and a chef dancing with shish kabob just two distractions). 

There are over two dozen songs, mostly with clever repartee, from Sipos’ wry “Perspective” to Ilona’s “Trip to the Library,” where she meets a blue-eyed optometrist who reads to this charming illiterate. Back to back are the two more ambitious numbers, Amalia reveling in the “Ice Cream” her opponent Georg has surprised her with, and Georg’s exultant, solo realization of the title song—and the show’s big hit—“She Loves Me (but she doesn’t know it).” 

As the show takes off, the cast performs with increasing gusto, culminating with Jacqueline Andersen, up on her toes, delivering “Ice Cream” in the style of art song, acting out Amalia’s overlapping emotions with winsome charm—and with Coley Grundman’s ecstatic dance, belting out the title tune. 

Pat King presides over a fine quintet from the ivories, and choreographer Chris Bell has paired well with Marti Baer’s stage direction to maintain the often parallel kinetic fields of retail ensemble with soliloquy or pas de deux trading focus, all on the stage at once, liable to burst out in song and dance at the uncorking of a scent flask. The ensemble players—Tom Accettola, Stuart Rosenthal, Mary Kidwell, Nancy Benson, Hattie Mullaly and Mr. Love—are crucial to this effect in their quick changes of character, appearing and disappearing, the crowd of faces in a busy European city. 

Marjorie Moore’s costumes and Renee Echavez’s lighting compliment Dave Wilkerson’s sets, all slightly impressionistic to sparely suggest the ambiance of a Budapest rendered fabulous in its day-to-day affairs, a little of that “Lubitsch Touch” gracing the often head-long rush of an American musical comedy with the master’s deft sophistication. 

SHE LOVES ME 

8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and at 2:30 p.m. Sundays through May 12 at Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org.