working against love
by Douglas Messerli
Miklos Laszlo Illotszertór (Parfumerie),
translated and adapted by E. P. Mowdall (from the English translation by
Florence Laszlo) / Beverly Hills, California, Bram Goldsmith Theater in the
Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts, the performance I saw was the
matinee on November 30, 2013
The new Bram Goldsmith Theater in
Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is stunningly
beautiful, as well as the set for its first theatrical production which I
attended this past Saturday. The play, opening just before Christmas, seemed a
perfect selection for the new Annenberg complex, in part because a big element
of this play concerns Christmas shopping at a Budapest shop, and the film
version of Hungarian Mikos Laszlo’s 1937-based play, The Shop Around the Corner, remains one of most popular of
Lubitsch’s cinematic comedies; the musical version of this work, Jerry Bock’s
and Sheldon Harnick’s She Loves Me,
happens to be one my favorite Broadway musicals of all time, whose New York
revival I saw in 1994. Other versions of this play, the movies in the Judy
Garland vehicle In the Good Old
Summertime and You’ve Got Mail—if
not as wonderfully crafted—also attracted large audiences. What a wonderful
opportunity, it seemed to me and others to see the ur-version of this popular
work.
Too bad that the original play, at least as adapted by E. P. Dowdall, a
nephew of the original playwright, falls so flat. While Lubitsch honed in on
the details of character, differentiating the eight employees of Miklos
Hammerschmidt’s perfume parlor, Laszlo’s version flattens their personalities. Nearly
all the employees of this shop keep secrets from one another that show them up
to be self-centered and somewhat unlikeable. The cadish Steven Kadar (Matt
Walton) is having a not-so-secret affair with Mrs. Hammerschmidt; Ilona Ritter
(Cheryl Lynn Bowers), previously Kadar’s love interest, has a more-or-less
permanent fiancée whom she, suddenly and inexplicably, marries before the
second act as she disappears from the play. The young delivery boy Arpad Novack
(Jacob Kempt) is not only incompetent but an inveterate gossip and a dangerous
bicyclist, whose aim is to become a clerk. The play’s two central figures,
Amalia Balash (Deborah Ann Woll) and George Horvath (Eddie Kaye Thomas), are
selfish, unaware lovers who cannot even recognize one another as their secret
correspondents, and spend their working days demeaning one another. Even the
somewhat nebbish elder clerk, Sopos (Arye Gross) later admits that it was he,
to protect his job, who wrote a note to his boss revealing that Mrs.
Hammerschmidt was involved with one of the staff. Hammerschmidt suspects George is her secret
lover and in irritated vengeance fires his most trusted employee on the first
day of this drama. Only Miss Molnar and Arpad’s replacement Fritz seem to have
no secrets to reveal, but then they are so one-dimensional that they hardly
exist. In short, there is something so dislikeable about these figures (as
opposed to the movie and musical wherein even rakish Kadar is fairly loveable)
that after a few moments of conversation we lose interest in their
machinations. The workers of Hammerschmidt’s Parfumerie, alas, if very human,
are terribly sympathetic figures.
All of this might have been ameliorated if the cast could bring life to
their roles through their acting skills. It may have been that in the balcony
where I sat the acoustics were just not that good, but it seemed more likely
that this semi-professional cast was just not up to the demands, declaiming
their lines without great commitment to their characters.
Despite the stunning set (by Allen Moyer), moreover, director Mark
Brokaw brought little creativity to their movements across the stage, using his
actors primarily to bring various articles in and out of drawers only to take
those same objects, soon after, away. The large, highly polished, horseshoe
counter at the center of the stage was used less as a spot where they might
occasionally converge than as a kind of container in and out of which the
various salespeople moved for no apparent reason. The richly brocaded settees
were employed more for a placement of perfumed candles than as spaces in which
characters might sit upon and share their little communal gossipy. Perhaps this
was all intentional, suggesting their own illogical efforts at communication
and purposefulness, but, in the end, their aimless actions proved simply
distracting. The play, after all, eventually depends on their pausing to
reflect—and join in camaraderie.
Certainly there are moments in this work when the character
interrelationships momentarily elevate the play into something—as my friend
Perla Karney, whom I encountered after in the lobby, described it—“sweet.”
Sipos’ fatherly advice to the young George is often engaging, as is his
eventual feeling of guilt for having initiated the series of events which
culminates in Mr. Hammerschmidt’s attempted suicide. Although he could not
match the comic bluster of the film’s Frank Morgan, Schiff’s Hammerschmidt, at
times, does nicely convey the saddened confusion of a man who, in his devotion
to his job, nearly loses his wife. And the final scenes between George and
Amalia (Thomas and Wolf) are touchingly exhilarating as they both suddenly
perceive that behind their perpetual spats was love rather than belligerence.
And we know, at heart, that Laszlo’s play is a gentle love story of a world
gone by. It’s just too bad that this “original” Illotszertór couldn’t live up to the expectations created by its
various reincarnations.
Los Angeles, December 2, 2013
Reprinted from US Theater, Opera and Performance (December 2013).
