Gil Hates Everything

Ah, the travails of shop salesfolk who unknowingly fall in love with one another’s correspondence while not getting on with one another in person. This is a popular Hungarian play which has been adapted for James Stewart and Tom Hanks amongst others. This musical dates from 1963 and was popular at the time, and when revived in 1993 garnered yet more nominations for Best Revival. I’m sorry to have to tell Mark Roberts that the 1994 London revival won all the Oliviers, including for the leads. Why do people love Ruthie Henshall? Anyway…

This is intended as a gentle and harmless romcom, so it’s really important that the characters and their songs work perfectly as required, because it’s not like the plot itself is going to carry any surprises. Fortunately, Bock and Harnick are pretty good at this. There’s a lot of innocuous old-fashioned wit, the characters are differentiated by what they say and how they say it (which helps me on those occasions when the singers’ voices aren’t particularly differentiated), and, y’know, there’s nothing actively wrong with it. And it’s nice to see a show which is at least nominally set somewhere other than New York, although I’m sure everyone on Broadway easily recognized the kind of shop in question.

Good songs: well, “Tonight At Eight” is fun, with the guy Georg panicking about his date; “Perspective” recalls “Company Way” from “How To Succeed In Business” while also adding a brilliant dose of Eastern European fatalism; and “Try Me” is an amusing demonstration of skill by a clerk seeking a promotion. “(Vanilla) Ice Cream” is kinda funny, although I’ve heard it enough times that it’s getting old now; still, it has style, as does “A Trip To The Library”, the second female lead’s romantic resolution. I also liked the style of the ensemble songs, which keep the action moving, with constant interjections of the richer world with which these lower-class sales clerks must intersect, and “Twelve Days To Christmas” is a pretty spectacular montage with some excellent chord changes.

On the other hand, as usual for a show from forty-six years ago, a lot of the female solos are old-fashioned (“Will He Like Me” sounds a lot like “Do You Love Me?” but isn’t as good, and “I Resolve” probably sounded good forty-six years ago but slightly sucks now) and everything that isn’t specifically good is quite bad – including the title song, which is slightly embarrassing.

This soundtrack is a fairly solid chunk of music, and meets its goals in that old-school perfectly professional way. I can see why it was a choice for a revival, and it’s not like it’s totally crap. But as opposed to “Fiddler”, which is an epic in miniature form, this show is just a miniature, and while executed well enough, it’s had its day, and we ought to be watching this century’s miniatures, and reserving our revivals for the truly astonishing… such as “Fiddler On The Roof”, which Bock and Harnick wrote the following year. It’s not that “She Loves Me” was bad at the time; it’s that we’re bad for constantly looking back.

Random Panda is going to be generous and award “She Loves Me” six out of ten pieces of bamboo.

(originally posted 2009)