Theatre Guild of Oceanside puts on ‘She Loves Me’

Jordan Coene has dreamed of the role of Amalia since she was eight years old and just starting out in theater.

The Theatre Guild of Oceanside recently put on the musical She Loves Me at Oceanside School 6. Director Bruce Bider had to organize rehearsals around divergent schedules to make it happen. The audience laughed and cheered throughout the performance.

“I’ve been trying to study this role for ages,” said Coene, who played the leading woman in this production. “Just finding out what makes her tick, what makes her a human being, and how she observes the world around her.”

Coene wanted to know how Amalia feels about every character in each of her scenes and how that changes throughout the musical. Coene also feels sentimental about the audience’s experience of the musical.

“I would love for them to realize that no matter what there is somebody for them who loves them, whether it’s romantic or in a friend sense,” Coene said. “No matter what, you have somebody.”

Audience members appreciated all the hard work that the cast and crew put into the production. One audience member, Mitch Kessler, is a big fan of the musical as a hallmark of Broadway history.

“This to me was (like) revisiting an old friend,” Kessler said.

He also felt that this cast and crew did justice to the musical, of which he has the record at home.

“I’m a huge fan of She Loves Me,” Kessler said. “This was a fully realized production of a beautiful, delicate, valentine of a show, which recruited talented people to pull off.”

The lyrics and music in She Loves Me are by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock – the same duo that created Fiddler on the Roof. The musical is based on a play by Miklos Laszlo called Parfumerie. The play and the musical both take place in Hungary. It had a comeback in 1998 with the film You’ve Got Mail, where the two leads are owners of bookshops rather than perfumery clerks.

In She Loves Me, Amalia and Georg are two perfumery clerks who are unknowingly each other’s secret pen-pals that met through a lonely-hearts ad. They constantly fight at work, until the day the pen-pals decide to meet. At that point, George finds out his pen-pal is Amalia, but doesn’t let her know. He changes his tune towards her and slowly wins her over until at the finale he finally admits who he is.

The audience cheered and clapped at Oceanside School 6 when the two finally fell into each other’s embrace at the end of the show.

The Theatre Guild of Oceanside put on musicals and plays from the early 1960s until it stopped in 1997. It was only last year that the guild started putting on shows again. Its first show back was Dames at Sea in 2022.

This year, director Bruce Bider wanted to offer a show that gets the audience into the holiday spirit. She Loves Me builds up to Christmas in the second act. He also wanted to expand the number of cast members.

“It was a good fit in terms of cast size, last year there were nine people in Dames at Sea, this show has 15-20,” Bider said.

Bider finds that every show he puts on is a different experience, because it includes different individuals.

“Every cast has its own group personality,” Bider said. “I took away great memories of a wonderful musical and a very committed and hardworking cast.”

Bider has other wishes for the audience.

“I hope they leave with a romantic glow at the end of the show,” Bider said.