About She Loves Me

When She Loves Me opened on Broadway on April 23, 1963, the critic Norman Nadel described it as “a musical play with which everyone can fall in love.” She Loves Me is a delicate, sophisticated love story with a book by Joe Masteroff and a closely integrated musical score of 23 numbers by lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock.

The original Broadway production was the first musical to be both produced and directed on Broadway by Harold Prince. In 1993, 30 years after its first Broadway opening, the show was triumphantly revived by the Roundabout Theatre and moved to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway. Directed by Scott Ellis, the critically acclaimed revival introduced a new generation to this heart-lifting, intimate and beguiling jewel box of a musical.

She Loves Me is based on a classic 1940s MGM film, The Shop Around The Corner, which was directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starred James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. That film, as well as the 1949 Judy Garland-Van Johnson film, In the Good Old Summertime, was based on a 1930s Hungarian play by Miklos Laszlo called Parfumerie.

Set in a city in Hungary in 1930s, the show concerns the adventures of the staff of Maraczhek’s Parfumerie. The manager, Georg Nowack, is constantly at odds with the most recent addition to the staff, a young woman named Amalia Balash, but is unaware that they are in fact anonymous pen pals known to each other in their letters only as “Dear Friend.” Arriving at the Café Imperiale to meet to his mystery correspondent, Georg realizes that it is Amalia, but does not identify himself to her. Eventually, their relationship blossoms into love and he reveals the truth by quoting from her letters.

Although the story told in She Loves Me is a beautifully crafted small portrait of a bittersweet romance, it is aglow with important truths about human experience. The characters are depicted in careful details as the book, lyrics and music weave a delicate tapestry of fantasy and reality, smiles and tears.

In the middle-European world of the mid-1930s before the Nazis and before the Communists, signs of trouble were already in evidence. She Loves Me offers us a glimpse of a depressed economy in which businesses were closing, clerks were afraid of losing their jobs, and customers who still had cash to spend were treated like royalty.

The radiance that surrounds the characters in She Loves Me takes on a special poignancy when we realize that many of them probably perished during the Second World War as the Germans and Russians struggled over Budapest. In our post-perestroika world, the show is even more evocative. As Sheldon Harnick stated in an article in Playbill magazine, “People now seem to feel She Loves Me has something to say about humanity, about decency – in the light of everything that’s now happening in Eastern Europe.”

In reviewing the revival of She Loves Me, Howard Kissel said, “As the real world grows more ugly, its tender world seems more affecting and evokes longing for a bygone era.” Although the show itself is from a musical theatre era 30 years in the past, critic Frank Rich wrote in his review of the 1993 production, “its unsentimental romantic emotions never age. As Georg and Amalia gradually overcome their cynicism and melt with affection, we melt too in spite of our own cynical 1993 instincts. She Loves Me turns out to be one love affair that, against Broadway’s odds, has grown only deeper with time.”

From The Music Theatre International Study Guide for She Loves Me. Music Theatre International, New York, NY.

Performances

Oct 19, Fri (8 pm)
XPost Show Reception
XLimited Seating
Oct 20, Sat (8 pm)
Oct 21, Sun (2 pm)

Oct 26, Fri (8 pm)
XLimited Seating
Oct 27, Sat (8 pm)
Oct 28, Sun (2 pm)

Nov 2 , Fri (8 pm)
Nov 3, Sat (8 pm)
Nov 4, Sun (2 pm)

Nov 9 , Fri (8 pm)
Nov 10, Sat (8 pm)
Nov 11, Sun (2 pm)

Nov 16 , Fri (8 pm)
Nov 17, Sat (8 pm)
Nov 18, Sun (2 pm)