Culture & Community | Long Wharf Theatre | Arts & Culture | Musical Theater | ConnCORP
Curtis Brown Photography.
All the signs are there. Amalia Balash (Alicia Kaori) is jumping up and down on the bed, holding a pint of vanilla ice cream. She is wearing blue and white striped pajamas, a reprieve from the complicated hats and dowdy heels whose burden it is to convey the time and place. It is 1930s Budapest. In mild wonder, she admits: “I like him! I really like him!”
Unmistakably, She Loves Me is a romantic comedy. The ice cream leaves little doubt. Kaori and her costar Julius Thomas III tread the boards as enemies-turned-lovers Amalia Balash and Georg Nowack in the reimagined musical, running at Long Wharf Theatre now through Dec. 30.
All performances take place at the LAB at ConnCORP, 496 Newhall St. in Hamden. Tickets and more information are available here.
She Loves Me is a musical adaptation of the 1937 play The Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklós László. Long Wharf Theatre’s interpretation—which follows the play’s 2016 Broadway revival—preserves all its intimacy and excitement, with music reimagined by Andy Einhorn specifically for this production.
A five-piece band nestles into an alcove next to the stage—cello (Peter Zey), violin (Lu Sun Friedman), clarinet (Sam Moffett, in for Harry Kliewe the night this reporter saw the performance), trumpet (Shaun Rimkunas), and a lace-draped piano. A roving accordion player (Jacob Heimer) makes occasional forays onstage, testing the boundaries between worlds.
The arrangement of the space also encourages blurred lines. The stage is laid out in an alley setup, with the action of the play running between facing sets of risers for the audience. Actors burst through the stage doors, scampering to romantic assignations or late to work at the perfume shop, where a little sign hanging on the stage window reads “NYITVA” (Hungarian for OPEN).
Curtis Brown Photography.
At the center of the action, Amalia and Georg rub each other the wrong way as coworkers at Maraczek’s Parfumerie even as they exchange anonymous romantic letters through a lonely hearts club. Kaori’s genuine awkwardness as Amalia substantiates Georg’s frustration with her (and is a welcome foil to the natural sprightliness which is unavoidable in musicals).
Maraczek’s Parfumerie also employs Ladislov (played by Danny Bolero), Ilona (Mariand Torres), and Kodaly (Graham Stevens), and they are equally prone to secrets and heartache. Their lies—to themselves and each other—unravel at a pace that makes the play feel fast and weightless. But while the plot of the play is driven by miscommunication and repressed attraction—standard for the genre—its emotional force is generated by music.
The band musters a folk song for an anxious waiter performing a Russian hat dance, leaping between tables to pour wine. A single violin chaperones Amalia as she dictates a letter to her mysterious sweetheart. The crash of piano keys follows a gunshot.
Like She Loves Me, Long Wharf Theatre itself is on its second or third adaptation. Now entering its 60th year, Long Wharf shuffled off its brick-and-mortar coil in 2022, leaving behind its physical space in the New Haven Food Terminal to “embed the company in the City.” She Loves Me was staged at The Lab at ConnCORP, a community hub in Newhallville with a focus on business incubation.
“Can you believe this used to be a middle-school gym?” Artistic Director Jacob Padrón asked the audience under the soft globe lighting of the theater.
Padrón’s efforts to make Long Wharf Theatre relevant and adaptable on-and-off the libretto page have mixed results. Padrón conceptualized She Loves Me as a “love letter to working-class people everywhere” (as written by dramaturg Jessica Durdock Moreno in the program), and the first act of the play leans into a critique of labor relations under capitalism.
The clerks at Maraczek’s Parfumerie bow and scrape to the wealthy shoppers, trilling in unison, “Thank you, madame, please call again; do call again, madame,” like Coldstone Creamery employees summoned to song by a two-dollar tip.
Aging clerk Ladislov Sipos asks bitterly, “Where is my pride? Swallowed long ago … Excuse me while I genuflect.” However, these blue-collar frustrations dissolve during intermission. The play closes with the staff of the parfumerie flocking around their petty, paternalistic boss Maraczek, played by Raphael Nash Thompson, in an affectionate champagne toast.
While She Loves Me is not a blueprint for political transformation, it is an adorable musical comedy with a killer band, presented by a theater company determined to adapt.
And no, you can't believe that this used to be a middle-school gym.