She Loves Me

She Loves Me sets two shop clerks who cannot stand each other against the fact that each is secretly writing love letters to the other. Georg and Amalia work the same counter in a small perfumery, argue about everything from display cases to the correct way to greet a customer, and go home each night to an anonymous correspondent they have never met.

The letters are signed "Dear Friend." Neither writer has enclosed a photograph or a name, and both have built a version of the other out of paragraphs about books and loneliness. Around them the shop keeps its own weather: an owner distracted by a private grief, a smooth colleague working an affair on the side, a delivery boy angling for promotion, and a Christmas season closing in on all of them.

The musical has a long paper trail. Miklos Laszlo's 1937 Hungarian play Parfumerie supplied the plot, which had already reached the screen more than once by the time Joe Masteroff wrote the book, Jerry Bock the music and Sheldon Harnick the lyrics for the 1963 stage version. Bock and Harnick had written Fiorello! before it and would write Fiddler on the Roof after.

The score is unusually intimate for its era, closer to chamber opera than to a brass-led showpiece, with nearly the whole story carried in song. Numbers such as "Tonight at Eight," "Will He Like Me?" and "Ice Cream" turn small events into enormous ones, and much of the comedy comes from watching characters sing themselves into positions they will have to climb out of.

It is a quiet show about a loud feeling, and it takes its time. By the point the two clerks work out who they have been writing to, the audience has been waiting for it for two acts, which is exactly the intended effect.