She Loves Me

The Sweet Scent of Perfection

She Loves Me is a musical with a book by Joe Masteroff, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and music by Jerry Bock. The musical is the third adaptation of the 1937 play Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklós László, following the 1940 James Stewart-Margaret Sullavan film The Shop Around the Corner and the 1949 Judy Garland-Van Johnson musical version In the Good Old Summertime. It surfaced again in 1998 as the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan feature You've Got Mail.
The musical premiered on Broadway in 1963 and ran for 301 performances. Subsequently it had productions in the West End in 1964 and award-winning revivals on each side of the Atlantic in the 1990s, as well as regional productions. She Loves Me was revived again on Broadway in 2016, and the production became the first Broadway show ever to be live-streamed.

Synopsis

Set in Budapest, Hungary during the 1930s, She Loves Me revolves around the colorful staff of Marcazek's Parfumerie, in particular it's head clerk Georg Nowack and their newest clerk Amalia Balash. Georg and Amalia are both members of a lonely hearts club, an anonymous pen pal exchange, where they write deeply intellectual and amorously poetic letters to each other. At work, they are unaware of each other's identities as their respective “Dear Friend”, the anonymity made all the more hilarious by the fact that they seem to despise each other in person. She finds him arrogant and petty. He finds her annoying and uncooperative. She Loves Me is all about the complications that put them at at odds and that eventually lead to their learning the truth. Falling in love is just the happy byproduct of their neuroses and desperation to find romance.