From Broadway To 52nd Street
She Loves Me opened the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on April 23, 1963 and the show ran for 301 performances. Sheldon Harnick penned the lyrics and Jerry Bock composed the music to the tune She Loves Me which has entered into the pantheon of jazz standards. The musical starred Barbara Cook, Daniel Massey, Barbara Baxley and Jack Cassidy.
The Story: Set in Hungary in the late 1930s, the story follows two coworkers George and Amalia who unwittingly meet through a Lonely Hearts column. As the two anonymously write love letters to each other, things don’t go so well at work. Not knowing that they are each other’s pen pal, they constantly fight. Further Georg’s boss, Mr. Maraczek, who thinks George is having an affair with his wife, constantly criticizes George at work. Eventually, the boss realizes that another clerk is having the affair. In the end Georg and Amalia discover that they are each other’s pen pal and they fall in love.
Broadway History: The alternative theatre movement aimed to break these commercial and psychological restraints by bonding spectator and audience and by lessening the theatrical illusion of an imagined space and time. Conventional theatre taught the spectator to lose himself in the fictional onstage time, space, and characters; conversely, alternative theatre relied on the spectator’s complete consciousness of the present. This present is the real time and space shared by the audience and the performers; only when the audience consciously perceives the present can they perceive the theatrical experience as relevant to their lives, and not as escapist fiction. The primary importance of the spectator’s consciousness of the present is that he is an active force in creating the theatrical event rather than a passive observer of a ready-made production.
Sponsored By
www.whatissuitetabu.com