Laura Benanti & Jane Krakowski Steal ‘She Loves Me’

“She Loves Me” is probably the best Broadway musical you’ve never heard of (unless you’re a Broadway nerd). It’s an unassuming, Old World charmer, testament to craft, witchcraft and romance that echoes the operettas of Romberg and Friml. It didn’t make much of an impression when it opened in 1964 despite an astonishing pedigree: Based on the same Miklós László play that Ernst Lubitsch turned into 1940’s “Little Shop Around The Corner” with James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan (and, much later, Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail” for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan), She Loves Me was the first show Hal Prince directed from inception to opening night. The score is by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, who next would write “Fiddler on the Roof,” and the book is by Joe Masteroff, who would next write the book for Kander & Ebb’s “Cabaret.”