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When Harry Met Sally review "When Harry Met Sally" may hardly feel like a title one needed to meet again, especially after the deservedly tepid response to the February opening, at the Theater Royal, Haymarket, of this theatrical adaptation of the much-loved 1989 film. Well, what a difference a cast makes: Gone are Luke Perry and Alyson Hannigan from Loveday Ingram's production, which continues to take place on the most severely clinical and anonymous sets for so New York a story. On board now for the summer are onetime Brat Pack-er Molly Ringwald, inheriting Meg Ryan's screen role as Sally, and another American TV name, Michael Landes, filling Billy Crystal's cinematic shoes as Harry. .And they're a lot better. Sure, Ringwald looks pretty long-in-the-tooth to play the guileless new recruit to Manhattan whom we see in the opening scene struggling with the locks on the very apartment that Harry comes to paint. But Ringwald grows into the role: If she's never ditzy in the Meg Ryan manner, she has an attractive sincerity to counter the hyper-fastidiousness of a character who, in other thespian hands, could be mighty irritating.
Landes is even more engaging. Not only can he land the laugh lines that more or less passed his predecessor by, but he gets the arc of emotional diffidence turned slowly to dismay as Harry realizes across a dozen-plus years that, lo and behold, he has loved Sally all along. Though Marcy Kahan's script is scarcely more polished than the direction (the ending still doesn't work), the show now boasts a quality that, in the theater, can be hardest to achieve: genuine, unaffected charm.
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