A familiar storyline -- man and woman meet, man and woman hate each other, man and woman fall in love through anonymous letters -- will be performed in Golden Age musical form starting tonight.

The Penn State School of Theatre will debut its performance of the musical "She Loves Me" -- the inspiration for 1998 movie "You've Got Mail" -- tonight at the Citizens Bank Theatre, 127 S. Allen St. Remaining performances will run every night at 7:30 from Nov. 10 through 19, excluding Nov. 15.

Laurie Veldheer, who plays Amalia, the lead female character, said the show is about a woman who gets a job in a perfumery in the 1930s and doesn't get along with one of the other clerks.

Amalia and the other clerk -- Georg, played by Andrew Boetcher -- each have an anonymous pen pal with whom they are each falling in love. What they don't know is that they're writing to each other.

"It's about their story -- what will happen between them?" Veldheer (senior-musical theatre) said. "Will they find out who the other person is, and if so, will they fall in love, or will they hate each other?"

The play was originally adapted from the 1940 movie "The Shop Around the Corner," Veldheer said.

"She Loves Me" and "The Shop Around the Corner" are both set in Hungary, as opposed to "You've Got Mail," which takes place in the United States.

"It's one of the most charming musicals ever written," Boetcher (senior-musical theatre) said. "It's just a Golden Age show, so the plot is a little simpler and it's a little more lighthearted than other more contemporary musicals."

Boetcher said Georg and Amalia's secret letter-writing affair is the "one beacon of hope" in their lives, amidst their jobs, single lives and the fact they fight all the time.

Veldheer said the fact that Amalia is not married adds to the mystery of the story.

"The thing we always talk about is that Amalia is really, really smart and witty, intellectual, pretty, very independent -- but she's 30 and not married," she said. "The question is why?"

Georg is also in his 30s, and all of the other clerks in the shop look up to him. He keeps to himself and is shy and timid.

The director of the show, Amy Anders Corcoran, said her favorite scene is when Georg and Amalia realize they see the world in the same way.

"I think my two characters really capture that nicely," Corcoran (graduate-theatre) said.

She said she wanted to choose a small Golden Age musical that would fit in the Citizens Bank Theatre downtown because the Playhouse Theatre is under construction.

Like Boetcher, Corcoran said she likes the lightheartedness of the play

"I love the hope of the piece -- that you can hope for love or a new job, or a good friend or a community, and sometimes it comes through," she said.

As far as the music of the play, Veldheer said the material is hard and very high-sung. She said the play doesn't contain a lot of big song-and-dance numbers.

"The musical numbers are really the person who's singing -- most of the time alone on stage," she said. "That can be pretty challenging."

Boetcher said most of the principal actors have a song in the show, which rarely happens. Even though the play is challenging vocally, Veldheer said it's a lot of fun -- and she never feels like it's work to rehearse.

Because the play was adapted from a movie, set designer Ryan Howell (senior-theatre) said the script maintains the same episodic style, which includes seven scenes that take place in very small and intimate areas.

Every other scene is a different location, so Howell said he had to create a set that could flow quickly and waste the least amount of time.

"The set I created involves a turntable which, when turned to the correct side or portion, will reveal a workroom or a shop exterior -- and when it is set in the main position, it creates the perfumery, which the majority of the show takes place in," Howell said.

He said he also created a drop to create an intimate café when backlit, and a street when lit from the front.

Howell said he enjoyed the complexity of the show.

"It really made me think -- I had to really rack my creativity to come up with this final product," he said.