‘She Loves Me’ Is a Daydream of the Ordinary
Ben BrantleyMarch 17, 2016: Sometimes vanilla ice cream can taste like sweet deliverance. Such is the discovery made by one Amalia Balash in the 1963 musical “She Loves Me” — which has been rapturously revived in a new production by the Roundabout Theater Company — when she receives a gift of this frozen confection from an unlikely suitor. As Amalia trills her delight in a song that flies toward heaven on ascending high notes, audiences for Scott Ellis’s production, which opened on Thursday night at Studio 54, are likely to know exactly how she feels. That’s partly because “Vanilla Ice Cream” (for that is the number’s title, of course) is performed by Laura Benanti, an actress whose joyful soprano is a conduit for instant empathy. But it’s also because, from the moment the show begins, with a salutation to the working day by the employees of a perfume shop in 1930s Budapest, “She Loves Me” is a sustained reminder of the pleasures of exalted ordinariness. Written by Joe Masteroff (book), Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), this tasty tale of love lost and found at the workplace is the great vanilla ice cream musical.
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