THEATER REVIEW : ‘She Loves Me’ at Lawrence Welk Is a Pure and True Holiday Gift

A few yards past the bronze statue of Lawrence Welk waving his baton, and a few feet past the paper cutout of Welk where visitors have their pictures taken, lurks the most winning musical of the holiday season.

It’s “She Loves Me,” at the Lawrence Welk Dinner Theatre and, like the Christmas gift that keeps on giving, it continues through Dec. 31.

Looking for an uplifting way to start the New Year? Try this tender tale about a sparring clerk and a salesgirl in a perfume shop who are shocked to find that the anonymous pen pals they have been writing to are--horrors!--each other.

The plot is nothing new. It started out as a play by Miklos Laszlo called “Parfumerie” and was adapted first into “The Shop Around the Corner,” a 1940 movie with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. Then it became the 1949 movie, “In the Good Old Summertime,” and then “She Loves Me,” a glowingly reviewed Broadway failure of 25 years ago.

But time and regional theater have proved kind to “She Loves Me,” a show of subtle delights that proved too gentle and intimate for the big, bad Broadway arena.

There’s a touch of “Cyrano de Bergerac” in that each character cannot put the wonderful letters together with the ordinary face each snipes at in the morning. There’s a bit of “Marty,” in which ordinary people are rendered extraordinary by love. All this and the delightful tunes by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock (the “Fiddler on the Roof” team) are anything but shopworn in the right hands. And this production is definitely in the right hands.

Director Mark Stevens has assembled a cast with voices and style that sparkle right down to the ensemble.

The score’s scope is lyrical, not epic. It won’t send anyone out singing the equivalent of “Sunrise, Sunset,” but it gives each performer a moment in the spotlight to reveal his character.

The simple delights of a song like “Vanilla Ice Cream,” in which Zoe DuFour as shop girl Amalia Balash, sings soaringly about the treat brought her by Georg Nowack, the clerk, seems perfectly in tune with the sweet ordinariness of the character.

As for Scott Everhart as Georg, well maybe he is too good-looking to be so quickly passed over by Amalia in the shop, and maybe he is altogether too decent for her to mistake brief irritability with bad nature. But he comes across as one of those essential good eggs, the main criterion here, and, when he clowns romantically through “She Loves Me,” it is impossible not to root for him all the way.

Even so, the romance of Amalia and Georg could get mired in cloying sweetness, if it did not derive its texture from the interwoven tales of the others working in the shop.

As Ladislav Sipos, the philosophizing clerk, big Bart Williams gets a chance to dance with the mincing delicacy (kudos to Judy Ann Bassing’s clever choreography) of the compromising employee, who sings about his theory of avoiding confrontation at all costs in “Perspective.”

As the shop rake, Steven Kodaly, Paul Cira is the smirking, knowing fox in “Grand to Know You,” and Suzanne Harrer proves a brassy match, with unexpected depths, as his shop girl of the moment, Ilona.

Scott Viets shows ingenuous charm as Arpasd, the messenger who longs to become a clerk. J. Sherwood Montgomery provides affable solidity and bossiness as the shop owner, Mr. Maraczek, with a surprise demon tormenting him through much of the play. George Karnoff gets his chance to create a memorable waiter with a mission in “A Romantic Atmos1885889906wonderfully hapless busboy to kick around in another of Bassing’s cleverly choreographed dance efforts.

There is even something fitting about the plainness of the Lawrence Welk stage. Don Ertel’s versatile set fits the bill perfectly, without any pretensions at grandiosity. That is more than all right for “She Loves Me,” a story that ostensibly sets its story in Budapest only to underline how plain folks in a plain shop are, essentially, the same everywhere.

In an existential sense, maybe it doesn’t matter what happens to such specks of dust, sings Sipos in “Perspective,” in between popping ulcer pills. But, even if it doesn’t matter--existentially--this dandy little show proves it is impossible not to care about each human life. And thank goodness for that.

“SHE LOVES ME”

Book by Joe Masteroff, based on a play by Miklos Laszlo. Music, Jerry Bock. Lyrics, Sheldon Harnick. Director, Mark Stevens. Musical director, Jerry Fenwick. Choreography, Judy Ann Bassing. Set, Don Ertel. Lighting, Tim Reeve. Costumes, Suzan Ortmeier. With Bart Williams, Scott Viets, Suzanne Harrer, Paul Cira, Scott Everhart, J. Sherwood Montgomery, Mindy Hull, Terri Cannicott, Lesley Torresen, Lori Carle, Zoe DuFour, Leon Natker, George Karnoff and Gus Moore. At 8 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday-Saturday; 1:45 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday, through Dec. 31. Meals served 2 1/2 hours before curtain time. At the Lawrence Welk Dinner Theatre, 8975 Lawrence Welk Drive, Escondido.