All right, so if the show is set in
pre-war Budapest why are the cast using American accents and
pre-decimal sterling prices in the script? The former, I think, because
the rhythms of Joe Masteroff's book and Sheldon Harnick's lyrics to
this 1963 musical adaptation of Miklos Laszlo's
Parfumerie
are ineluctably American: despite recent pronunciation drift, a rhyme
of "clerking"/"working" would sound far too laboured in a cisatlantic
voice. As for the prices, well, that £-s-d stuff is so quaint. It adds
to the charm.
It is a charming piece of
work. Jerry Bock's score combines Sixties bounce with a timeless
innocence, and Stephen Mear's direction and choreography have a
bright-eyed vivacity, with ideas such as staging a song set in a
fin-de-siècle trysting joint as if Bob Fosse were doing
La Ronde
in period. In a second-act number about the mounting shopping frenzy in
the central perfume shop as Christmas approaches, Mear has his chorus
deliver essentially the same moves first as self-possessed customers of
distinction, then ever less decorously until it is equal parts
tarantella and pitched battle (as Amy Ellen Richardson's eyeballs
threaten to pop out through her spectacles).
The story itself is familiar through several film versions from Ernst Lubitsch's
The Shop Around The Corner to Nora Ephron's
You've Got Mail:
the two people who have such an abrasive relationship in the flesh
(here, as co-workers in Maraczek's parfumerie) eventually realise that
they are the same couple who have fallen in love with each other
through an anonymous correspondence. Six years after
How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying,
Joe McFadden's ingenuous appeal once again scores big in a Chichester
musical; as his opponent/beloved, Dianne Pilkington hits her stride
when her character begins to melt and touches on a Madeline Kahn vibe
of lovable exasperation. As Mr Maraczek himself, the ever-amiable Jack
Chissick goes beyond
Sprechgesang and into
Growlgesang,
and Lee Ormsby steals his single scene as an imperious head waiter. It
was an astute piece of programming to put the show (this season's
opener) on Chichester's smaller Minerva stage; to fill the main
Festival Theatre space, the material would have had to be over-sold,
but here it proves chirpily seductive.
Written for the Financial
Times.