[ATTENDED: June 20, 2013] She Loves Me
I won free tickets to this show in Murray Dodge Hall, and olde theater in the heart of the Princeton University campus. Sarah and I were delighted to discover that the theater held only 190 people and that our seats were in the fifth row!
This is student theater, but, as I said to Sarah, these are seriously good acting students (better than most of the students that I went to school with, anyhow).
She Loves Me is a musical based on the drama Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo. Before being adapted in 1963 as She Loves Me, (Music by Jerry Bock, Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, Book by Joe Masteroff) it was previously adapted as the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner and the 1949 musical In the Good Old Summertime. It was also revisited in 1998 as You’ve Got Mail.
If you’ve seen any of these adaptations, yo know the story. And if you haven’t, it is this: two shop workers who dislike each other are secretly each others’ pen pals. In this version, they each write to a lonely hearts column, and plan to meet for the first time very soon. It’s a simple enough story. But what sold me in this version was the music—which was simple and catchy and very very funny. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 