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The Hungarian playwright Miklós László – no, I hadn’t heard of him either – did pretty well out of a play he penned in Budapest in 1937 (the Jewish writer wisely emigrated to the States the following year). ‘Parfumerie’, a romantic comedy about a pair of beauty counter assistants who fall in love via an anonymous lonely hearts ad, and take a good while to realise their true identity, went on to see a number of adaptations for stage and film, including Nora Ephron’s brilliant script for the 1998 film ‘You’ve Got Mail’.
Thirty-five years before that, this musical version hit Broadway, with music and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock (the guys behind ‘Fiddler On The Roof’), and the venerable director Hal Prince at the steering wheel.
Revived now with customary chutzpah by Landor artistic director Robert McWhir and his team, the show has a good deal of charm, and a couple of gorgeous numbers. The title song – in which leading man Georg Nowack (John Sandberg) finally realises that his colleague and correspondent Amalia Balash (Charlotte Jaconelli) doesn’t actually hate his guts – is as lovely a Broadway tune as any I’ve heard, and Sandberg sells it brilliantly.
There is, however, little spark between Sandberg and Jaconelli – a former ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ contestant whose operatic voice, though impressive, feels sometimes ill-suited to this material – and some other performances are uneven. The first act feels very slow (not helped, I’ll admit, by the fact that on the night I saw it, the show was 40 minutes late starting due to a cast emergency). On other nights, the pace may well move at a faster clip and things do pick up greatly in the second act. But the real issue lies with the book: it’s the kind of show where, after the first half-hour, you just want to bang the characters’ heads together, and save everybody a good deal of fuss about not very much at all.