She Loves Me, Menier Chocolate Factory, London, review: Scarlett Strallen can break your heart at Amalia's idealistic ardour

Matthew White’s revival of the musical, written by the authors of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is a heartening treat this Christmas

Scarlett Strallen (right) and Katherine Kingsley star in a classic tale of reluctant romance from the creators of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (Alastair Muir)

This 1963 show has suffered the unfair fate of being overshadowed by the fact that its lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock went on to unveil their world-conquering hit, Fiddler on the Roof, the next year. But Matthew White’s revival at the Menier delectably establishes that She Loves Me has its own distinctive virtues. A chamber piece of enormous charm, it reminds us that there was an era when writers of musicals knew that it was possible to be romantic and witty, sensitive and absurd all at the same time, giving the audience the exquisite mixed pleasure of listening with a fond smile on the lips and a lump in the throat. She Loves Me now feels like the antidote to the high-tech blockbuster: everything is on a human scale without any hint of grandiosity; the creators know that the essence of humour is seeing things in proportion (there’s a hilarious song “Perspective” about an idiotically extreme attempt to do so). White’s production is irresistibly alive to all these qualities.

Joe Masteroff’s book is based on a Hungarian play by Miklos Laszlo that has inspired no fewer than four films – from the Lubitsch classic The Shop Around the Corner to You’ve Got Mail. The setting is a perfume store in Budapest in 1934. Two of the assistants, Georg and Amalia, take the kind of instant dislike to one another that can mask mutual attraction and bicker away as the Budapest version of Beatrice and Benedick. The twist is that they don’t realise that they are besotted pen pals, engaged in an anonymous epistolary romance through a lonely hearts club. Mark Umbers skilfully shows you a man who has taken refuge from his sense of isolation and insecurity behind a front of workaholic priggishness. With the crystalline force and beauty of her rich soprano and with her expert timing, Scarlett Strallen can break your heart at Amalia’s idealistic ardour and make your mouth twitch with amusement at its mildly ludicrous aspects.

The score gives her some great songs which are refreshingly honest about how the mind actually works – as it fools itself or forgets and is forced to recap or struggles to fit stuff into a pre-existing mould. So the bitter-sweet waltz “Dear Friend”, which Amalia sings while she waits in vain for their first date in a restaurant, has a pattern of teetering repeated notes that give her voice comic irritation as well as aching melancholy: “Charming, romantic, the perfect cafe/Then as if it isn’t bad enough a violin starts to play”. And has the inner tussle between dutifulness and the pleasure instinct ever been dramatised with more joyous wit than in “Vanilla Ice Cream” in which Amalia keeps being sidetracked by involuntary thoughts of the newly attractive Georg from the soulful letter she is writing to the “friend”? Strallen negotiates the passage from hostility to infatuation (a masterpiece of succinctness in the writing) with brilliant, chrysalis-bursting aplomb.

Played on a stage with four mini-revolves that allow the proceedings to shift elegantly from the perfumery (a deluxe vision of gilt and rose in Paul Farnsworth’s design) to its facade and other locales, the production boasts a wonderfully characterful cast. Which is just as well since all the employees – including Dominic Tighe’s caddish, womanising Kodaly and Callum Howells’s adorable, Welsh delivery boy (they’ve chosen to use British rather than American accents) – get at least one moment in the sun. The glorious mischief of Bock’s music (handled superbly by Catherine Jayes and her band) and the literate comedy of the lyrics (unsurpassed outside Sondheim) come together supremely well in “A Trip to the Library”. The song starts off in mock-bolero fashion as Katherine Kingsley’s excellent Ilona, a blonde broad who has hitherto been lothario-fodder, tells us how her life has been changed since she ventured into that unfamiliar bookish venue and met a “slightly bespectacle”' optometrist: “I have to admit in the back of my mind I was praying he wouldn’t get fresh/And all of the while I was wondering why an illiterate girl should attract him/Then all of a sudden he said that I couldn’t go wrong with the way of all flesh/Which of course is a novel but I didn't know or I certainly wouldn’t have smacked him”.

Did I mention that the story climaxes enchantingly at Christmas? I can't think of a happier seasonal treat than watching this show.