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She Loves Me

A busy day in Maraczek’s Parfumerie, with Georg Nowack (Russ Farmer, downstage right) gatekeeping job applicant Amalia Balash (Ruth Wong-Miller, in cream figured dress) Photo Nanc Price Photography.

The pre-set for She Loves Me, at Théâtre Servus Credit Union (La Cité Francophone), is simple. A storefront with a bench in front of it, a backstage orchestra visible over the top. But as the stories unfold, the set (Leland Stelck) unfolds more literally, revealing the main set of a parfumerie in 1930s Budapest, and later shifting quickly to create a romantic cafe, a hospital room, and whatever else is needed. The counters, shelves, displays, and stock convey a store filled with luxuries and needs. It felt like it would be interesting to browse more closely – like going to Lush (without its overpowering mix of scents).

The show focuses on the parfumerie’s owner, Mr Maraczek (Brian Ault) and its employees (Andrew Kwan, Russ Farmer, Scott McLeod, Brendan Smith, and Christina O’Dell) along with job-applicant Amalia Balish (Ruth Wong-Miller). Like a Maeve Binchy novel, the script (Joe Masteroff) and clever direction (Melanie Lafleur) convey that all the characters have interesting stories that we want to hear more about. And not just the principal characters – the ensemble makes up a store full of recurring customers, a romantic cafe full of – romances – and other intriguing bits which I won’t tell you.

My two favourite ensemble bits of this show were “Twelve Days to Christmas” – putting a familiar retail spin on the Advent season – and the whole scene in the cafe. The cafe scene made good use of the depth of stage available to them, and with the raked auditorium seating of the Théâtre Servus, the audience could appreciate the performances upstage of the three women dining at the bar-counter and their server. Not having looked at the show program before the show started, I was surprised to see that this white-jacketed cafe server was Brendan Smith, whom I’d enjoyed on local stages since his appearance in Walterdale’s Light in the Piazza. I had been impressed by the enthusiasm and voice of the young shop delivery boy but with costuming and posture I hadn’t identified him as Smith! Other romantic couples are also enjoying drinks and dancing, and playing out their own narratives, while Amalia waits alone at a centre table for her mysterious pen-pal sweetheart. Aaron Schaan and Julia Stanski, spotted shopping together in earlier scenes, seem to have a proposal accepted. Real-life couple Trish van Doornum and Michael McDevitt are snuggling at a side table. Side flirtations are suggested in a fun dance number involving peeping from behind menu folders.

The premise of having couples meet through a newspaper Lonely Hearts Club correspondence column, getting to know each other through letters without revealing mundane life details, was updated to email for the 1998 movie You’ve Got Mail. Dating app experiences in 2023 encourage providing photos early on, so the plot-device of accidentally falling in love with a co-worker based on their text communication seems less timely, but the story is still easy to relate to.

I was pleasantly surprised at the range of sexual/romantic lives accepted among the main characters. Ilona, the woman who spends time at her lovers’ apartments (Christina O’Dell), is not vilified for it. Her co-workers as well as the audience are genuinely rooting for her to find a nice man who deserves her – or to have a nice evening at the library if that’s where she finds happiness now. Georg Nowack (Farmer) is single, so the boss assumes he must be spending his evenings at cabarets and nightclubs with a different woman every night, but no, he prefers quiet evenings at home.

I also appreciated that this story didn’t follow the trope of an independent woman being attracted to a cranky rude man despite herself, and then winning him over. Instead, Amalia is openly critical of Georg when he is being rude, only begins to appreciate him when he does something thoughtful (bringing her vanilla ice cream when she is sick), and then we see them gradually building trust and then affection over the days of a busy Christmas retail season.

White man dressed in 1930s overcoat, hat, and scarf sings joyfully. — “She Loves Me” – Russ Farmer as Georg Nowack. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

The songs and instrumental music (Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock) enhance the experience throughout. Elizabeth Raycroft directs an orchestra of 11, and the performers all have good songs for their voices. I particularly enjoyed “Vanilla Ice Cream” and “Try Me” and the harmony in “I Don’t Know His Name”.

Two women with ornately curled hair and form-fitting business wear wrap small presents while chatting. — Ruth Wong-Miller and Christina O’Dell in “I Don’t Know His Name”, She Loves Me 2023. Photo Nanc Price Photography

In 2015, Foote In The Door did She Loves Me as their first mainstage production ever. Since then, Broadway audiences have also had another chance to appreciate this musical, and there’s a cast recording of that 2016 Broadway production – I was delighted to discover that Christina O’Dell’s role of Ilona was played by Jane Krakowski of 30 Rock.

The company has been producing musicals ever since, at the Fringe as well as in their mainstage seasons. I attended opening night of that first production, so it was a treat to watch this one and recognize many familiar names of people who had been with the company from early days or who have joined Edmonton’s musical theatre community more recently. The deeper proscenium stage and more sharply raked seating at Théâtre Servus for this production supported different choices in directing and design to connect the audience intimately with the performers and allow interesting ensemble play. Costume choices for this production (Viola Park) were more subtle than in the 2015 show, with the parfumerie clerks mostly in well-fitting understated grey suits rather than plain green shopcoats, and glimpses of colour being added gradually, particularly in Amalia’s garments and accessories. As is current practice for many local companies now, some program information is displayed on a projection screen before the show starts, with the full program available via QR code. (I don’t have a good system for saving my online programs, the way I have boxes of hardcopy programs for everything from Fringe shows to Broadway.) And of course, in 2023 some of us attend the theatre wearing masks.

She Loves Me is playing Wed-Sat evenings and Sunday matinees until November 26th. Tickets are available here.

Back to the theatre and Into The Woods

A Little Night Music

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The other night, before the wildfire smoke blew in to town, I was walking in my neighbourhood in the evening about how lucky I am to be living at this latitude, with the magical long twilights as we approach the summer solstice. The long light warm evenings feel rich with extra opportunity. And I wondered how to share that feeling.

Last night I watched Foote in the Door’s production of A Little Night Music, a Sondheim musical based on an Ingmar Bergen movie directed by Mary-Ellen Perley. It’s set in Sweden around 1900. The second act takes place at a country estate, much of it outdoors. And there are songs about that magical extended twilight, songs that describe the feelings better than I ever could, with lighting (Sarah Karpyshin) and abstract set pieces (Leland Stelck) to support them.

A Little Night Music has a cast of 18. At first I kept referring to my program to figure out who was who and how they were connected. But later on, it just made more delightful threads of plot arcs to follow, to wonder how the cat’s-cradle of romances and affairs would untangle itself. Commenting on the liaisons and prospects of the others, and on the nature of love in general, are a grandmother (Pauline Farmer) and granddaughter Fredrika (Rebecca Erin Curtis, a MacEwan grad I will watch for again).

I loved the detail, consistent through the show, that star actress Desiree (Glynis Price) was surrounded by clutter and chaos – stockings and scarves draped over her furniture, enough male visitors that they cross paths in her apartment – her current lover Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Russ Farmer) and her former lover Fredrik Egerman (Morgan Smith), both sporting mustaches of importance. Count Malcolm’s indignant wife Charlotte (Monica Roberts), a likeably sarcastic character, comes up with a unlikely scheme to defend both herself and Egerman’s young wife Anne (Ruth Wong-Miller) from Desiree’s designs on their husbands. Anne is an astonishingly naive 18 year old. She claims to love married life but seems oblivious to being more passionate about teasing her stepson (Allan Cabral) than about her much-older husband. It was “amusing” (as the character often says) to watch Wong-Miller in this role, since she usually plays characters with more agency but was completely believable as the protected and petted young wife. Desiree’s daughter Fredrika, canonically about 13, seemed to be wiser with more understanding of the world and relationships, just from listening to her grandmother’s stories of liaisons and from having toured with her mother’s acting troupes.

Monica Roberts, as Charlotte, and Morgan Smith, as Fredrik, in A Little Night Music. Photo by Nanc Price Photography.

There were a lot of bits in this production that had me laughing out loud – some of them were funnier to me than to other members of the audience. The part where Fredrika’s grandmother says that she brought Fredrika home to do a better job raising her because “ Stage managers are not nannies, dear; they don’t have the talent.” The bit where Fredrika takes Anne to watch Desiree on stage in a French comedy, the play-within-a-play a more exaggerated version of the grandmother’s liaison stories and the contemporary affairs and intrigues, and Brian Ault playing a footman or herald in a truly bizarre wig.

One of the common features of Sondheim musicals is complex music. Daniel Belland is musical director, with an ensemble of eight other musicians. As well as the characters named above, there are several servants, some with their own romantic plotlines, and a chorus of six, singing clever harmonies and hinting at further layers of complication (“Remember”) that we don’t get to see.

A Little Night Music is a musical for people who like musicals, a change from this company’s last production, the stage-musical version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. It’s long but it moves along at a good pace and I was surprised when it was already time for intermission. It’s playing at La Cité Francophone, until June 8th, with tickets through Tix on the Square.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but oh so good …

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The original Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a 1988 movie with Steve Martin and Michael Caine. I can’t remember if I ever saw it, or if I just saw the trailer in a theatre and got a general sense of it – a goofy story of con artists trying to beat each other at their shared game.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is also a musical, with music and lyrics by David Yazbek, who seems to have a career of making unlikely movie comedies into musicals that one would never expect, such as Full Monty and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Plain Jane did this one last spring but I didn’t write about it) The musical is currently being performed by the local company Foote in the Door Productions.

I didn’t really remember anything about the plot or characters of the movie when I went to see it opening night, and I decided not to listen to the soundtrack ahead of time. It was a lot of fun this way. I could immediately pick out the character tropes (Russ Farmer as the sophisticated English con artist and Trevor J as the uncouth American one, Melanie Lafleur as a rich gullible visitor to the Mediterranean resort and Zack Siezmagraff as a crooked French police officer who reminded me of Captain Renault in Casablanca. But the plot had a lot of twists I didn’t anticipate, and both the storyline and the general character ridiculousness had me giggling a lot. I asked director Carolyn Waye beforehand what she’d most enjoyed about working on this production. She said that they had all laughed a lot during rehearsals, and she couldn’t wait to watch an audience enjoy the bits they’d already had so much fun with.

I was so caught up watching the interplay of the two con artists with their various marks and allies, along with some delightful dance interludes (highlighting Megan Beaupre, Julia Stanski, Tim Lo, and Andrew Kwan) that it took me a while to realize that I hadn’t yet seen the other Foote in the Door principal, Ruth Wong-Miller. She appears later, as Christine Colgate, the American Soap Queen. Both scammers see Christine as an ideal target, so they decide to compete for her money, the loser to leave town.

The songs had very clever lyrics and enough changes of genre to be interesting, especially Shannon Hunt’s “Oklahoma” and the cheesy rock ballad “Love is my Legs”. Matt Graham was musical director of a nine-piece ensemble, visible behind sets of French doors and acknowledged occasionally by the script when characters called for changes of atmosphere, but never overpowering the singers.

This show is a lot of fun. The two hours flew by for me, and the endings were surprising and satisfying. Foote in the Door has tackled some more serious material (Carousel) and more complex drama (Company) – but I think it’s equally impressive that they pulled off this heist of a tall tale without a hitch.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is playing at L’Unitheatre until November 10th. Tickets are available through Tix on the Square

Trevor J, Ruth Wong-Miller, Russ Farmer, Melanie Lafleur, and Zack Siezmagraff. Photo by Nanc Price.

Ephemeral Pleasures

A few notes to save along with the theatre programs, restaurant bills, and concert handstamps