correction
In an earlier version of this article, the song "Try Me" was mischaracterized as a romantic plea. It is a plea for a job. Also, the last name of actor Jake Loewenthal was misspelled in a photo caption. The article has been corrected.
“Fiddler on the Roof” is one of the mainstays of musical theater, according to Jon Kalbfleisch, Signature Theatre’s longtime music director. “Anyone who runs a theater will tell you that if you need to raise money or bolster your subscriptions, you do ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ” he explains. “It’s such a beloved show that people always want to see it, again and again.”
And who could disagree? The show’s source material — Sholem Aleichem’s short stories about a Jewish patriarch troubled by changing times — was translated into such enduring songs as “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “If I Were a Rich Man” and “Sunrise, Sunset.” The songs are so good, they make you wonder why other songs by composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick aren’t better known.
Signature is now satisfying that curiosity by mounting another Bock-Harnick show, “She Loves Me,” which opened on Broadway in 1963, just a year before “Fiddler.” As Kalbfleisch works with the 14 cast members and 10 musicians on the score, he has been impressed by the same musical qualities that make “Fiddler” so appealing.
“As a team, Bock and Harnick work extremely well together,” he says. “The music writing is so beautifully crafted, so direct and immediately accessible, and that makes the lyric writing very clear. Even if you’ve never heard any of their music before, the first time you hear it, you think you’ve heard it before.”
Much of the show’s plot is delivered not through the spoken dialogue but through Harnick’s lyrics. This often results in a rush of words skipping across a series of eighth notes, but this never goes on too long before Bock slows the tempo to deliver a melodic refrain of quarter and half notes, often using the title phrase, whether it’s the opening number “Good Morning, Good Day” or a young man’s plea for a job, “Try Me.” These refrains provide islands of pleasure in a fast-moving river of song — places where the listener can pull up and relax for a moment.
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“Repetition is key,” Kalbfleisch says, “because if there’s not repetition, it’s hard to follow. All music has repetition at some level. I just got back from conducting Brahms, and he was brilliant at varying the repetition. Sondheim was keen on that, so it would be different when it came back. Bock and Harnick are more about repeating the repetition exactly. It’s not, ‘Oh, they’re singing that again.’ You’re glad to hear it again. It may be simple, yet it’s so skillful and so right.”
“She Loves Me” is based on the 1937 play “Parfumerie” by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo, which was adapted into the brilliant 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film, “The Shop Around the Corner,” and the less successful movie 1949 film musical “In the Good Old Summertime.” (The same plot, involving a snail-mail romance, would be updated for the email age by Nora Ephron as 1998′s “You’ve Got Mail”). All these iterations tell the story of a man and a woman who can’t stand each other even as they carry on an anonymous but increasingly romantic correspondence. When they finally agree to meet in person, complications ensue.
Just as “Fiddler” was flavored by the folkloric Jewish music of a 1905 Russian shtetl, so does “She Loves Me” reflect the metropolitan cabaret music of 1934 Budapest. Thus, the latter includes a bolero, a tango, a Christmas carol, a patter song and a waltz. And just as the songs for “Fiddler” were tailored for its original star, Zero Mostel, a singer of limited range and expansive personality, so were the songs in “She Loves Me” designed for its star, Barbara Cook, a soprano with a dazzlingly wide range.
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The acrobatics of the song “Vanilla Ice Cream,” in fact, have made it a favorite audition piece for sopranos. Another song from the show, “Tonight at Eight,” is a go-to audition song for tenors. Even if the young singers in the cast aren’t familiar with the show, they know these numbers.
In the 17 months between the original openings of “She Loves Me” and “Fiddler,” however, the Beatles had come to America and had changed the landscape of pop music forever. It was the end of Broadway’s golden age; never again would show tunes be the center of the pop world.
“These were the last shows where Broadway was the quintessence of popular music.” Kalbfleisch notes. “And it wasn’t because of a decline in quality. There was a wealth of talent and shows on Broadway during that era, not just Bock and Harnick, but also Jones and Schmidt, Kander and Ebb, Adler and Ross. But there was less attention paid, and not every show could hit the top. Bock and Harnick did it with one show, but their other shows never got their due.”
If you go
She Loves Me
Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. 703-820-9771. sigtheatre.org.
Dates: Through April 24.
Prices: $40-$108.
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