The opening was a cultural affirmation for New York's Chinese American community, which currently numbers more than 360,000, approximately 4.5 percent of the city's population.

"I'm kind of surprised to see Chinese people in the theater district, but it's really cool," said Carmen Ben, 29, who lives in the Chinese enclave of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and was made aware of the play via an ad in the World Journal, the largest Chinese newspaper in North America.

Ms. Ben was one member of the mostly Chinese audience who piled into the nearly sold out Westside Theater on 43rd Street, where the show will run until June 3rd.

Whether they were Chinese, Chinese American, or just American, the audience fell for the lighthearted but often touching show, which consists of a series of chronologically arranged, though unrelated vignettes that relate the complications, travails, and joys of relationships from young adulthood through old age.

The first vignette features young adults fretting about which one will call the other first; one of the last takes place at a funeral and shows a widow and a widower discovering that their need for love has not died with their respective spouses.

The four Chinese actors who comprise the cast — Lin Yilun, Yu Yi, Wen Yang, and Ma Qingli, all but one of whom was trained at the Shanghai Theater Academy — throw themselves into their roles of anxious daters, bored married people, and contented lovers with admirable abandon and infectious charisma.

A breezy, sweet, but sneakily poignant piano and violin soundtrack, performed by Chinese musicians, complements the actors.

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The inspiration for I Love You originated back in 2004, when The Sound of Music swept through Asia on an immensely successful 18-month tour.

Though the show was performed in English, "It really opened our eyes to the possibilities of bringing Western-style theater to an Asian audience," said Mark Routh, Chairman and Executive Producer of Broadway Asia, which collaborated with Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center to produce the show.

"It made us realize that the economy had evolved so that people had enough leisure dollars to spend on things like theater."

After The Sound of Music, Routh and co. were encouraged to try another American-style show in Asia, but would translate this one into Mandarin to make further inroads into what had been an unexpectedly receptive audience.

The decision to show I Love You was based on a host of factors, according to Routh.

For one, "the lack of a deep trained talent pool for Western-style musicals" made the small-scale, cast-of-four production of I Love You more practical.

But more than this was the universality of the show's themes of love, sex, and relationships.

"This show really hits a nerve with everyone," Routh said. "And from a business perspective, we especially wanted something that young people could relate to. The setting of this show is contemporary, so young people really felt it was relevant."

So a production of I Love You was launched in Shanghai for a four-week run last December. Like The Sound of Music two years earlier, the enthusiastic reception with which it was met with proved a revelation, and its popularity convinced its producers to take it to Broadway.

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The popularity of the Mandarin version of I Love You is partly attributable to the pains the writers took to translate an American show into something that would appeal to a Chinese audience. And while much of the script lends itself to a seamless translation, it did present some cultural hurdles.

One scene, called the "Lasagna Incident," in the American version, features a young woman trying to impress a love interest with her cooking. But "audiences in Shanghai wouldn't have appreciate the degree of difficulty in making lasagna," Routh said. "So we changed it to a very specific Chinese noodle dish that is notoriously difficult to make."

Another scene in the American version shows a half-complacent, half-bored husband watching football while lying on the couch. But for a Chinese audience, for whom the male fascination with American football is, quite literally, a foreign concept, football was changed to basketball, a popular sport in China.

(This scene also features the wife trying to connect with her husband's sports obsession by wearing the jersey of Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets Chinese superstar. Yao has been invited to the show and is trying to work it into his busy schedule, according to Meri Krassner, one of the show's producers.)

There were differences in the show itself and differences in the audience response. The scene that takes place at a funeral, for instance, got a big laugh at the Westside, because "the Chinese find our irreverent treatment of death funny," according to Jimmy Roberts, who wrote the music for the show.

The show's open treatment of love and sex presented an interesting distinction between Chinese and American audiences as well. Prevailing opinion holds that the response of the Chinese audience was more reserved than that of American ones, but that this distinction was less among younger audience members who are accustomed to discussing these issues candidly.

"It's different now than it was for our parents' generation," said Lilly Pang, 31, a native New Yorker who speaks English at her job but Mandarin with her parents.

It is this rapid transformation of the Chinese culture, sensibilities, and economy on which the producers of I Love You sought to capitalize. Judging by the large and enthusiastic crowd at the Westside, the experiment is going well.