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November 5, 2004
TT: Budapest, N.J.
I'm in today's Wall Street Journal, reviewing two shows, both excellent, albeit in very different ways.The first is a revival of She Loves Me that runs at at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse through Dec. 5:
For those unhappy souls as yet unfamiliar with "She Loves Me," it's based on "Parfumerie," a comedy by Hungarian playwright Miklós László that also spawned three popular Hollywood films, "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940), "In the Good Old Summertime" (1949) and "You've Got Mail" (1998). The farce-like plot is played for charm: Georg Nowack (George Dvorsky) and Amalia Balash (Michele Ragusa), two romance-starved members of a lonelyhearts club, have been sending one another anonymous love letters without ever having met....
What makes "She Loves Me" worthy of "The Shop Around the Corner," the still-unsurpassed Ernst Lubitsch film on which Joe Masteroff's book is closely and skillfully based, is the operetta-flavored score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. Their songs, all woven into the action with uncanny deftness, are kaleidoscopically varied in tone and approach. None became a standard (the title tune came closest), but several should have, and if "Days Gone By," "Tonight at Eight," "Vanilla Ice Cream," "Will He Like Me?" and "I Resolve" are new to you, get ready for an evening-long treat.
First produced in 1963, "She Loves Me" hasn't been done in New York since the Roundabout Theatre Company revived it 30 years later. I didn't see that much-admired version, but I can't imagine how it could have been better than this one, directed with untricky flair by James Brennan and cast to something approaching perfection. Not only does Ms. Ragusa do some of the best singing I've ever heard on the musical-comedy stage (her role, created for the legendary Barbara Cook, actually contains a timber-shivering high C), but she's a sweetly winsome actress to boot....
Though it had two respectable Broadway runs, "She Loves Me" is obscure by comparison with "Fiddler on the Roof," the show that made Messrs. Bock and Harnick rich and famous. Don't ask me why, since it's just as good. Perhaps its intimate scale fails to please those who expect musicals to be big and noisy. Perhaps there's too much music and not enough jokes. Perhaps the first act, which clocks in at just over 90 minutes, is a trifle too long for impatient theatergoers. All I can tell you is that Paper Mill's production leaves nothing whatsoever to be desired....
The second is Mario Cantone's Laugh Whore:
"I hate to sound really gay," Mario Cantone proclaims in "Laugh Whore," a one-man show written by Mr. Cantone, directed by Joe Mantello ("Wicked") and playing through Jan. 2 at Broadway's Cort Theatre. Seeing as how the very next thing he does is impersonate Judy Garland, having previously impersonated Liza Minnelli and Carol Channing, I'd say he's wasting his breath. "Laugh Whore," like Mr. Cantone himself, is really, really gay. It's also rib-splittingly funny--the funniest show on Broadway, in fact, give or take "Avenue Q." I can't remember when I laughed so hard at anything, anywhere.
Mr. Cantone is a New York-based actor-singer-comic best known to TV watchers for his recurring role on "Sex and the City" and to theatergoers for his jarringly vivid cameo in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins" (he played Samuel Byck, a wannabe Nixon-killer). He looks like a gay version of Al Pacino, sounds like a gay version of Jerry Lewis and does impersonations like...well, just like. His Garland, done minus drag, is downright spooky, while his impression of Jim Morrison doing a Christmas special, accompanied by the Doors, is positively demented....
No link. Buy a paper, or go here and do as you're told.
I expect that's the last you'll hear from me this week. My swollen uvula and I are headed back to bed. See you Monday.
Posted November 5, 2004 12:01 PM
