(L-R): Zachary Levi, Byron Jennings and Jane Krakowski in She Loves Me.
I don’t entirely know how to describe the experience of a production directed by Ivo van Hove except to say that I seem to have been living in one since December, when I saw his acclaimed reinterpretation of A View From the Bridge. I have just come from The Crucible (at the Kerr through July 17th), the other of Arthur Miller’s two most visceral plays, also directed by Mr. van Hove and designed by his partner Jan Versweyveld, and the four-month gap between has folded to something thinner than a memory, until the two spread together across theatrical time and space to form one blood-drenched morality play of the human condition. I don’t know if this is enough to call Mr. van Hove the best director of straight plays active in the American theater, but I will say that if he should decide to conclude this American trilogy with a revival of Abie’s Irish Rose I should probably have to hold my nose and buy a ticket.
To begin with, it is astonishingly well-acted by an extraordinary cast. Saorise Ronan, late of Brooklyn, in her stage debut, acquits herself well as the dead-eyed girl who accuses her former lover’s wife of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts, as does Tavi Gevinson as the accuser’s friend who grows disillusioned with pointing fingers. (I’m thrilled that a participant in the hugely underrated 2014 revival of This is Our Youth has been thus recognized.) But Ben Whishaw and Sophia Okonedo, as the Proctors, the skeptical couple who find themselves at the mercy of mob hysteria, steal the production, turning in sensitive, understated performances full of love, tenderness, and authenticity. Where Mark Strong, in A View From the Bridge, bellowed and growled in fear of loss of his world, Okonedo and Whishaw stand proudly and finally bow humbly. Tonally, this poses no threat of whiplash to Mr. van Hove, further proof of his maneuverability in the American canon.
Part of the production’s success -- equal to, but not quite exceeding, that of A View from the Bridge -- is that The Crucible remains such a gripping and a relevant play. Wisely, Mr. Versweyveld and Wojciech Dziedzic, the costume designer, have kept the visual details of the play out of the realm of temporal definition, so as to leave the events of the Salem witch-hunt it describes unmoored to any age -- a detail of which Mr. Miller would undoubtedly approve, given that his play, written in 1953, was meant to mirror the Communist witch-hunt of the McCarthy hearings. At first Mr. van Hove’s staging seems too small for the vast proscenium of the Walter Kerr, but as the show goes on we begin to see that he is treating figures like a slowly growing whirlwind, scattered and slow-moving at first, then faster and faster, whirling until the audience is forcibly drawn forward as a participant -- and a witness.
It’s become just as easy to recognize a Scott Ellis production as it is to recognize a van Hove one. Like Mr. van Hove, Mr. Ellis is a master of a his craft as a director, has a magnificent touch with actors, works exclusively with one scenic designer (David Rockwell, one of the best in the business), and harbors a deep love for the American stage canon. Unlike Mr. van Hove, Mr. Ellis has a facility, one of the most dependable on Broadway, for leaving the audience with an ear-to-ear smile that lasts for days and days afterward. After back-to-back knockouts with On the Twentieth Century and You Can't Take It With You and a relationship with Broadway hits going back to the eighties, it’s become his trademark.
So, for the 50th anniversary season of the Roundabout Theater Company (with whom Mr. Ellis has a long history -- he directed both of their first two Broadway musical revivals), it’s back to She Loves Me, Mr. Ellis’ first-ever production with the Roundabout back in 1993. Once again he directs and Mr. Rockwell designs, and Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi star as the dueling lovers in an adaptation of the same play that served as the inspiration for The Shop Around the Corner and You’ve Got Mail. Joe Masteroff, of Cabaret, wrote the deeply excellent book, borrowing just enough both from that play, Parfumerie, and from Samson Raphaelson’s script for Shop whole still having fun with it in a fashion uniquely his. It’s objectively a better book than Cabaret’s, and certainly a wittier one.
Meanwhile, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, who went on to write music and lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof a year after this musical, in 1963, used this little jewel-box certainty of an adaptation to do some of their most playfully experimental work. Bock’s music is just as sweet as it is fleet, and Harnick’s lyrics are so darting, quick, and satisfying they recall a puzzle of which you can't stop following the contours. (“Sounds While Selling” makes “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” look like “I’m a Little Teapot.”) There are twenty-two numbers in the show, and one can’t repress the feeling that Bock and Harnick just had a hell of a lot of fun writing this show and got carried away. Who wouldn’t?
Because this is an absolutely delightful musical revived in an absolutely delightful production with a radiant ensemble (Michael McGrath, Nicholas Barasch, Jane Krakowski, and Gavin Creel are standouts), an irresistible sense of fun, and two perfect leads. Ms. Benanti, whose voice alone should be billed above the rest of the cast, had a cold on the performance I saw her, not that you would know it for the bravura performance she turned in. The only thing that could match her singing voice is her funny, sympathetic, flawless stage presence. A lesser actor would've quailed in her presence. Instead, shockingly, the normally unremarkable Zachary Levi (late of NBC’s “Chuck”) more than matches her with the felicity of any rom-com leading man and energy that puts those leading men to shame. (When Mr. Levi, six-three, pulled off a perfect cartwheel during the title number, I was barely surprised.) I kept thinking he was doing an impression of some old matinee idol from the forties before I realized it was only that he was turning in a performance that would not seem out of place there -- the first I've seen in a while. If I loved this trademark Ellis production absolutely to death, if I would readily see it again several hundred more times, it’s for the same reason anyone still watches old romantic comedies -- the boy and the girl helped me fall in love with an old, dear friend all over again.
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