The musical opened at the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway (now the Richard Rodgers) on October 7, 1948, and closed on May 14, 1949, after having played 252 performances.
The original production starred Ray Middleton and Nanette Fabray, was directed by Elia Kazan, and choreographed by Michael Kidd.
One of the earliest examples of the concept musical, the action of Love Life was interspersed with vaudeville-style numbers that commented on the story, in a way very similar to Cabaret (which opened in 1966).
In 2017 Love Life was staged at Theater Freiburg using a German-language translation of Lerner's libretto by Rüdiger Bering.
His translation was approved of by the Kurt Weill Foundation and was praised for successfully "striking a tone reminiscent of the great song and operetta lyricists of the German and Viennese interwar years, such as Marcellus Schiffer and Fritz Löhner-Beda".