While studying Jerry Bock’s score for “She Loves Me,” Music freshman Keith Dworkin wondered why Ravel’s famous “Bolero” theme suddenly surfaces unannounced late in the musical’s second act. So he found the composer’s phone number and called him at home in New York.
“Hello, Mr. Bock,” Dworkin said. “It’s so nice to speak to you — such an honor — but I have a question. I don’t understand what ‘Bolero’ has to do with the show. Why did you quote it?”
Bock, 76, asked him in reply, “The first time you heard that, did it make you smile?” Dworkin told him that it had. “Well, that’s the reason,” Bock said.
Dworkin says Bock’s answer enlightened him to a crucial insight into his role as music director for the Arts Alliance’s spring musical, “She Loves Me.” The show simply is out to charm its audience. “Since realizing this, I’ve tried to highlight the lightness of the songs,” Dworkin says. “I just want the audience to enjoy themselves.”
Bock’s fourth collaboration with lyricist Sheldon Harnick (Music ’49), “She Loves Me” hit Broadway in 1963 and closed after only 302 performances. The pair rapidly reloaded and a year later launched “Fiddler on the Roof,” their greatest success. Despite “Fiddler’s” acclaim, an underground following for their earlier effort has developed throughout the decades, with an enthusiasm for its effortless sentiment and sunny, often exotic score.
The plot, borrowed from a play by Hungarian Mikl�s L�szl�, unravels largely on the floor of a posh parfumerie in 1930s Budapest. The alternately ornery and benevolent Mr. Maraczek (Music junior Nick Pulikowski) owns the shop and oversees a staff of six who, one by one, introduce themselves in song. Music junior Ben Diskant portrays Maraczek’s senior employee, Georg Nowak, who is enraptured by his lonely-hearts correspondence with an eloquent but anonymous “Dear Friend.”
Spirited knottiness ensues once Nowak discovers that his “lady of the letters” is none other than Miss Amalia Balash (Music sophomore Carly Kincannon), the pert, pretty young clerk at whom he has been constantly sniping on the job despite their growing attraction. A parallel narrative blossoms with performances by Communication senior Mike Cicetti as a dashing, unregenerate playboy and one of his starry-eyed targets, an ingenue played with endearing cattiness by Communication sophomore Morgan Weed. Communication freshman Adam Kantor cameos as a headwaiter who zealously cultivates romantic ambience in his cafe, where the ensemble erupts into an explosive mob tango underscored by snatches of Brahms’ “Hungarian Dances.”
The general levity is grounded throughout by the unflappable Sipos (Communication sophomore Zev Valancy), a middle-aged family man intent on keeping in work. A source of sense amid spouting passions, Sipos listens with empathy to the gripes of the younger shop-walkers and in his own solo offers his secret to serenity: Never disagree. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You’re so right, sir. Black is white, sir. ‘Scuse me while I genuflect,” he croons to Nowak as events begin to sour just before intermission.
“More so than most shows, the story is really told through the songs,” Valancy says. “Rarely does more than five minutes go by without someone singing something. The fact that there’s so much music helps the cast stay in the world of the play and never gives the audience a chance to drop out either.”
At no time in this production will the audience be plunged in the dark during set-changes. “A blackout in musical theater is death,” says Communication junior Josh Penzell, the show’s director. “We want to sustain the energy we’ve worked very hard to create.” To avoid interrupting the show’s flow, the crew has designed a pair of rotating sets that transform the scenes with minimal fuss.
With more than 25 songs, “She Loves Me” is one of the more music-heavy musicals of its day. The “very smart score,” Dworkin says, is suffused with a synthesized accordion. It calls for a 16-piece orchestra whose instrumentation — heavy on woodwinds and strings, light on brass — lends itself well to the frequent strains of Hungarian harmony that Bock adapts to his classic American idiom. Harnick’s lines playfully interrupt and overlap each other as they follow his partner’s intricate countermelodies.
But for all the attention it calls to itself, the music rises from — and always returns to — the story, romantic comedy at its purest. “I’m a believer that in music theater the music is facilitated by the acting and vice versa,” Dworkin says. He and Penzell strove “to meet in the middle.”
The curtain, of course, finds the happily crossed Nowak and Balash locked in a kiss. It is Christmas Eve and snow is falling. “The ending of this show is a perfect realization of utopia on stage through music theater,” Penzell says. “Amalia loves her ‘Dear Friend’ of the letters, but she also finds herself falling for Georg. Luckily he happens to be both people. There’s a kind of Shakespearean magic to it.”
“She Loves Me” will be playing in the Louis Room at Norris University Center Thursday at 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Tickets cost $5 for students and $10 for general admission. Tickets are available at the door or can be reserved in advance at http://shelovesme.cjb.net.
Medill junior Thomas Berenato is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected].
