There’s something strangely Disney-like about Arena Stage’s production of She Loves Me. Is it the candy-colored sets? The cartoonish dancing? The opening song, “Good Morning, Good Day,” which calls to mind Beauty and the Beast‘s “Bonjour” number? Or maybe it’s just that leading lady Brynn O’Malley seems to have taken her recent performance as Belle in Broadway’s Beauty and the Beast and transplanted it in D.C.?

She Loves Me, a classic, romantic musical adored by some and ignored by others, shouldn’t really take the fall for some of these comparisons — after all, it premiered in 1963, decades before Angela Lansbury sung about a tale as old as time. What does pre-date the work is The Shop Around The Corner, a Jimmy Stewart movie on which the musical is based. And while the story of pen-pal lovers who don’t realize that they’re exchanging letters with their real-life rivals is charming enough (it worked reasonably well for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail,” after all), this She Loves Me stumbles too frequently to pull off the same kind of magic that a film classic can do with ease.