Gershwin Redux: Crazy for You

The company of Goodspeed's Crazy for You. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

Crazy for You is the second of three Broadway musicals – so far – to rework hit shows with fabulous scores by George and Ira Gershwin. The first was My One and Only (1983), which had begun life in 1927 as Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire with his first dance partner, his sister Adele. The most recent was Nice Work If You Can Get It (2012), which is based loosely on the 1926 Oh, Kay! – best known as the musical in which the great, one-of-a-kind English performer Gertrude Lawrence introduced the beloved ballad “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

Crazy for You, the season opener at the Goodspeed Opera House, harks back to the 1930 Girl Crazy, which starred Ginger Rogers in the ingenue role and made a star out of Ethel Merman. But Crazy for You’s co-creators, the playwright Ken Ludwig and the director Mike Ockrent, who got together in 1992, rewrote the plot, retaining nothing but its backstage musical form and its western setting – an Arizona cattle town in the first version, a Nevada mining town in the second that has been struggling economically since the mines closed. In Girl Crazy, as TCM junkies well know who have seen the delightful Busby Berkeley movie version from 1943 with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, is about a young Manhattan playboy whose parents send him to a physically rigorous college to toughen him up, where he falls in love and winds up saving the school’s bacon by staging a professional-level musical revue. In Crazy for You the hero is a hoofer named Bobby Child whose mother wants him to go to work in the family banking business. She sends him to Deadrock, Nevada, to foreclose on a theatre, long out of commission (it’s now used as a post office); he falls for the postmistress, Polly Baker, at first sight – and puts on a musical show, with the help of his showgirl pals, who have just finished the season in the latest edition of The Zangler Follies on Broadway. But Polly hates him because she knows he was sent to Deadrock to take away the theatre. So he masquerades as Bela Zangler, the impresario behind the Follies. Bobby succeeds in getting Polly to love him, but only as Zangler; when he tries to tell her that he’s been merely impersonating the real showman, she thinks he's pathetic, a perspective that is given credence by the appearance of the real Zangler, who has followed the girl of his dreams, Tess, to Deadrock.

Will Burton and the company of Crazy for You. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

Got all that? Well, it’s merely the first act of the narrative, which operates like a berserk wind-up toy that refuses to wind down. (It would take another paragraph to summarize act two, which doesn’t make sense and adds two more – utterly implausible – romantic couples to the mix.) Fortunately, the plot is upstaged by eighteen Gershwin songs, six of them from Girl Crazy and the rest interpolations from other shows and films – eighteen in all, not counting a fragment from Gershwin’s Concerto in F – in addition to a great deal of wonderful choreography and, in the Goodspeed production, a stage full of extremely talented dancers. The overplotting can make you crazy, but it would be foolish to pretend that the Goodspeed’s Crazy for You isn’t entertaining.

The program lists Kelli Barclay as the choreographer, but the numbers, in whole or in part, are somewhat altered versions of the creations Susan Stroman came up with in 1992. (Some of Michael Fling’s staging echoes Mike Ockrent’s too, like the protracted mirror-image drunk scene in the second act that puts the two Zanglers, the real one and the pretend one, together.) That’s not a complaint: the choreography is imaginative and varied and full of surprises. “I Can’t Be Bothered Now” (a song borrowed from the Astaire movie A Damsel in Distress) riffs on the old gag about clowns piling out of a roadster by having a gaggle of showgirls emerge from Bobby’s mother’s limo. In “Slap That Bass” (first sung and danced by Astaire in Shall We Dance), the cast of Bobby’s revue – where the Zangler chorines are matched up with local men – use cuts of rope to simulate the strings of a bunch of bass fiddles. In one section of the first-act finale “I Got Rhythm” (one of the Girl Crazy originals), three male dancers shimmy on metal plates that appear to be small shovels to execute the damnedest version of a clog dance I’ve ever seen. The dance ensemble is fantastic. And just about everybodyon stage can dance, including the charmingly understated Jeremy Davis as Polly’s widowed father, Edward Juvier as the real Zangler, and Colin Bradbury and Michele Ragusa as the (real-life) travel writer Eugene Fodor and his (fictional) wife Patricia, who show up in Deadrock in search of western types. (Ragusa is much better as Patricia than she is in her other role, as Bobby’s high-society mother.)

There’s too much of Katie Scarlett Brunson’s Patsy, whose scratchy high pitch is a steal from Singin’ in the Rain that probably wouldn’t have worked even if Brunson were better at it. And there’s way too much of David Andrew Morton as the villain, Lank Hawkins, a saloonkeeper who wants to turn Deadrock into a tourist attraction with staged Wild West gunfights and has his eye on the defunct playhouse. Morton is so aggressive that he wears you out long before intermission, but it’s not entirely the actor’s fault – the conception of the character is from hunger. (Those gunfights are expendable too.) The real Eugene Fodor was Hungarian-American, but the musical already has one Hungarian (Zangler), and making him and his spouse English provides an excuse for the “Stiff Upper Lip” number, another lift from A Damsel in Distress, where Astaire performed it with George Burns and Gracie Allen. It doesn’t serve any purpose in Crazy for You: it comes at a point in the storyline where the company of the revue is trying to work out what to do when no one shows up to see it, and when the song is through they’re no closer to a solution. In terms of structure, the two knockout torch songs, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (from Shall We Dance) and “But Not for Me” (from Girl Crazy), performed back to back, cancel each other out, but by this point in the evening the Bobby-Polly relationship has become incomprehensible anyway.

Brittany Zeinstra and Will Burton. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

That doesn’t matter much, as it happens, because the two leads, Will Burton and Brittany Zeinstra, are splendid. Zeinstra is a tall, stunning, wide-eyed blonde who combines zest and elegance, a mezzo-soprano who imbues her numbers with a muted country swing. Burton has long legs and the parts of his face don’t quite fit together, which turns out to be the ideal tool kit for a musical-comedy clown. He sings well and he dances magnificently. Both he and Zeinstra can act – and they have chemistry, especially when they take the floor. The costume designer, Joseph Shrope, showcases them expertly and indeed everybody else as well. The music direction by Goodspeed’s veteran Adam Souza is rousing and fluid; the score is a patchwork but it doesn’t sound like one. Incidentally, It’s a treasure trove for Gershwin buffs – it includes two discards, “Tonight’s the Night” (from Show Girl) and “What Causes That?” (from Treasure Girl), long believed lost; another, “Naughty Baby,” written for a show (Primrose) that was produced only in London and Australia; and “The Real American Folk Song (Is a Rag),” a 1918 Gershwin collaboration that predates their first Broadway musical, La, La, Lucille. Eighteen songs are an overload, I guess, but is it possible to have too much Gershwin? I vote no.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.