When “She Loves Me” originally bowed in the spring of 1963, the musical received bouquets from critics and shrugs from the general public. The show, about bickering shop clerks by day and anonymous pen pals by night, has never caught fire at the box-office despite the fact that many theater aficionados count it as one of the greatest musicals ever created.“This is the platinum show of the Golden Age of musicals,” says theater historian and critic Peter Filichia. “There are many mysteries in the theater but one of the most mystifying is why this show has never been able to make a buck.”That’s not for want of trying. The show, set in 1930s Budapest, has had two West End productions and a widely acclaimed 1993 Roundabout revival on Broadway directed by Scott Ellis, where it received ten Tony Award nominations. At the time, Frank Rich of the New York Times called it “ Exquisite…a continuously melodic evening of sheer enchantment and complete escape.” Such raves fueled it to a year’s run but not much more than that. Now, as part of the Roundabout’s 50th Anniversary season, Ellis is once again mounting “She Loves Me.” The musical opens on March 17 at Studio 54 with an all-star cast including Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi as the squabbling lovers, Amalia and Georg; Jane Krakowski as love-struck Ilona; and Gavin Creel as her faithless lover.The new production has many of its devotees hoping the general public will finally catch up to what they consider its peerless construction, with a book by Joe Masteroff (“Cabaret”) and songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (“Fiddler on the Roof”). That the musical is not more widely embraced is puzzling considering that the original source material — the 1937 Hungarian play “Parfumerie” by Miklós László — has had a string of successful iterations. “The Shop Around the Corner,” the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film classic, placed Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan in a gift shop as a pair of antagonistic employees unaware that they are falling in love through their correspondence. Nine years later, the material received the film musical treatment through “In the Good Old Summertime,” starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson. And in 1998, writer-director Nora Ephron updated the story in “You’ve Got Mail,” starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.ARTINFO recently asked four prominent theater historians to assess the place of “She Loves Me” in the Broadway canon and to fathom reasons why it remains, as one of them remarked, “the theater’s most undiscovered gem.” Laurence Maslon, NYU arts professor and documentarian (“Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds”) As a friend of mine says, “If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’ll like.” It’s definitely a stealth musical in musical theater history. It’s a romantic and charming story with a twist and the last gasp of an operetta tradition so it’s a bit of an outlier historically and perhaps somewhat rarefied for the general public. The writers have delved so deeply into the characters and that’s why actors love the hell out of performing in it. It’s so smart about who these people are, what they want and what they’re thinking. The more they sing, the more you like them and the more you want them to sing again. You fall in love with every one on that stage and consequently you’re willing to follow them anywhere. I’m hard-pressed to think of another show so beloved by people and so ignored by the larger media. Of all the musicals that followed the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula, this is the best “chocolate sampler” you could ask for. It has real people in a form that doesn’t always get real people in it.Steven Suskin, theater critic and author (“Second Act Troubles”) I consider “She Loves Me” the best musical of the 1960s, which might sound extreme. I would place it higher musically than “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Man of La Mancha,” “Hello, Dolly!”, “Cabaret,” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” The sixties were a time of loud and brassy musicals and “She Loves Me” wasn’t vulgar, it wasn’t larger-than life. It’s an intimate musical and perhaps that subtlety is why it did not succeed originally. It’s way up there because of the material. The emotions come out of the songs and every one of them works for the characters. The book, which is, of course, by the same writer as “Cabaret,” is very, very good. It’s a very human story and one of the show’s delights is that the audience knows that these two are meant for each other. As the show goes on, it starts to dawn on them both, first Georg — he’s like a cow getting stunned — and later Amalia. And then they both explode in bursts of emotion and their unbounded joy is contained in the songs. With the exception of “Fun Home” and “Hamilton,” you simply don’t have this kind of literate, enchanting writing in musicals nowadays. This show may never be as successful as “Kinky Boots” but I don’t really care.Rick McKay, filmmaker and producer (“Broadway: The Golden Age”)Before I was a writer, filmmaker, and TV producer, I was an actor and I was in a production of “She Loves Me” at the Buck Creek Theatre in Indiana. It was like being in one of those jewelry boxes that belonged to your sister, which would open up and a song would play and a ballerina would dance. I’d never heard anything like it and the entire cast was as enraptured with the show as I was. That’s because each is a dream role and they are all so differently delineated. They’re never in competition with each other. What’s unusual is that each of the main characters, seven I think, is incredibly well developed and each has a song. Yet nothing is extraneous. There are a lot of people who don’t like musicals and the reason is because there is often so much filler. That’s not true of “She Loves Me.” This show is so lean. And because of that it doesn’t play like a musical. It’s like [the musical] “Gypsy.” It can survive without a note of music. It’s so intelligent. But in that way, the critics might have scared the public away. People get the idea that it’s “the thinking man’s musical.” It’s not. It couldn’t be more accessible.Peter Filichia, critic and author (“Strippers, Showgirls and Sharks”) For anybody who knows anything about musical theater, if it’s not the perfect musical, it’s damned close to perfect and it’s certainly underrated by the public. That may be because it opened at a time when the musical theater was starting to be a little more populist in its sound. Its operetta-like score — which is what a musical set in Budapest in the 1930s demanded — might have been a contributing factor to why the public has not embraced it. And maybe Budapest is too far off the beaten track for some people. It’s not Venice or Paris. The book is very taut and the sentimentality is measured by reality. We’ve all had the experience of hoping that this is going to be the love affair of our life and that hope being dashed. We fall in love with Amalia and when her heart breaks, our hearts break. When she learns [mistakenly] that her love is not young, may be bald and fat, she has to get past that and we love her even more. There’s been a great dumbing down of musicals and it may be that this musical is so erudite and intelligent it may be too good for the average man. Where does it fail? Only at the box office.
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