Sept. 3, 2003, 3:37PM

'She Loves Me' a concert-style benefit show at Ovations

By EVERETT EVANS
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

She Loves Me, one of the American musical theater's best-loved works, is this year's offering from Bayou City Concert Musicals. It opens Wednesday at Ovations.

v:shapes="_x0000_i1025">Kevin Cooney is Georg and Chesley Santoro is Amalia in Bayou City Concert Musicals' production of She Loves Me, a much-loved musical adaptation of The Shop Around The Corner.

Set in 1930s Budapest and based on Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner, She Loves Me centers on Georg and Amalia, two perfume shop clerks who dislike each other intensely -- unaware that they are carrying on an anonymous romance via "lonely hearts" correspondence.

(A 1998 movie, You've Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, set the story in the age of e-mail.)

Critics penned valentines to She Loves Me when it premiered in 1963 in a production directed by Harold Prince and starring Daniel Massey and Barbara Cook. With the hit 30th-anniversary revival in 1993, critics once again declared the show "the perfect romantic musical comedy."

DETAILS

She Loves Me, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Sept. 13. Ovations, 2536 Times. Tickets are $25. Call 713-527-8219, ext. 104, for reservations.

The witty and tuneful score is by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, the famed team whose other hits include the Tony-winning Fiddler on the Roof and the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! The book is by Joe Masteroff, who also scripted Cabaret.

A cast of veteran Houston talents will perform the concert-style rendition, led by Kevin Cooney (Georg), Chesley Santoro (Amalia), Paul Hope (Kodaly), Jennie Welch (Ilona) and Charles Krohn (Maracek).

Hope, an Alley Theatre company member, co-directs with Broadway veteran David Thome, who is providing choreography.

All proceeds benefit the Center of AIDS: Hope and Remembrance Project.