Still ‘Crazy’ After All These Years

This art form has been known for most of its history as “Musical Comedy.” But even so, it’s rare for the highlight of a major show to be a comedic moment rather than a strictly musical one. Nonetheless, that’s what we have in “Crazy For You,” which is enjoying a colorful new revival at Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut. In fact, the entire scene is so funny that it remains my major memory from the original run of “Crazy For You,” which played from 1992 to 1996 at the Shubert Theater. The specific bit in question is tricky to describe without spoiling any of the plot’s surprises, but let’s just say it’s a distorted mirror routine of the kind we associate with Harpo Marx, which that great comic performed with his brother Groucho in “Duck Soup” (1933) and, perhaps even more famously, re-enacted on “I Love Lucy” in 1955. The major difference between that mirror bit and this one is that Harpo was trying to make the other person think he was a reflection, whereas here the two characters are both inebriated to the point where they don’t realize that the other iteration of themself that they are interacting with is not a reflection. One burps, and the other says, “Excuse me.” “Crazy For You” was built on the bones of “Girl Crazy,” which in 1930 was the final traditional hit show for the brothers George and Ira Gershwin, followed by the very atypical “Of Thee I Sing” (1931) and the even more radical “Porgy and Bess” (1935), the latter being not a hit at first but an instant classic. But even in 1930, “Girl Crazy” was part of a long lineage that goes back to the 1923 story “The Nervous Wreck” by “E. J. Rath.” That name was a pseudonym for the married couple and writing team of Edith Rathbone Jacobs Brainerd and Chauncey Corey Brainerd, prolific writers of comic tales who had been tragically killed the previous year in the collapse of a theatre during a storm in Washington DC. In October 1923 Owen Davis’s stage adaptation, “The Nervous Wreck,” the quintessential fish-out-of-water story about an hypochondriac dude in the unlikely setting of the wild-and-woolly west, opened for a successful run on Broadway. That story next became a 1926 silent film comedy and then the 1928 musical “Whoopee!” with Eddie Cantor, which itself became an early Technicolor movie musical. “Girl Crazy” wasn’t an official adaptation, but used the same idea: an eastern playboy contending with western hombres, bandits, and two-fisted cowpokes in the land of cactus and sagebrush. “Girl Crazy” itself led to three film adaptations, from 1932, 1943, and 1965, although the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney-Busby Berkeley filming is the one with the real magic, and the “Nervous Wreck” idea manifested itself yet again as Danny Kaye’s first starring film, “Up in Arms” (1944). “Crazy For You” gives every indication of having started as a revival of “Girl Crazy,” but, judging by the apparently somewhat faithful 1932 movie adaptation and the 2009 City Center Encores revival, that original 1930 story is just a little too creaky — and the producers wanted to add in more Gershwin songs. So the masterful Ken Ludwig was brought in for a rewrite that acknowledges its debt to Guy Bolton’s 1930 libretto as well as to that earlier nervous wreck. That Mr. Ludwig has much more experience with non-musical comedies than song-and-dance ventures is hardly a drawback. “Crazy For You” is not only one of the most tuneful and toe-tapping shows most of us have ever seen but one of the funniest. The leading man, Harry Groener in 1992, and Will Burton at Goodspeed, has to be an adept singer-dancer as well as a master comic, and in both cases their timing and skills as a superior dancer have greatly enhanced their comedic timing. In the contemporary theater, nearly all humor is verbal, and physical comedy is so undervalued that we tend to tar all of it with the brush known as “slapstick.” But, as Mr. Burton, and his counterpart in that sequence, Edward Juvier, make clear at Goodspeed, sometimes slapstick comedy can be so well done and so satisfying that perhaps the term itself should be used more as a compliment than a putdown. The mirror bit becomes even more enjoyable when it transitions into a full-on number, “What Causes That,” whereby the producers throw a bone to Gershwin buffs with this number that virtually disappeared after the short-lived 1928 show “Treasure Girl.” (The one notable pre-”Crazy For You” recording was by Michael Feinstein in 1987.) The cast of ‘Crazy For You.’ Diane Sobolewski Apart from Messrs. Burton and Juvier, the cast is enlivened by Brittany Zeinstra as the leading lady, Polly, which is actually the same name of that character in “Treasure Girl.” The main squeeze in “Girl Crazy” was Molly, who was played by the younger Ginger Rogers in 1930 and renamed Ginger in the 1943 movie when played by Judy Garland. Ms. Zeinstra is talented, funny, and has a genuine period look; she does a swell job with several key Gershwin ballads, like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Embraceable You,” and “But Not For Me,” the latter two of which are actually from “Girl Crazy.”The 1992 producers leaned heavily into George & Ira classics mainly from their two iconic film scores for Fred Astaire, “Shall We Dance” and “A Damsel in Distress.” Using the jazz age anthem “I Got Rhythm” as the Act 1 closer is expected and welcome, but “Slap That Bass,” which in 1992 was built around an actual bass slapper, the prodigious Brian Nalepka, is another surprise.Not coincidentally, because George Gershwin (1898-1937) died so young, shortly before the flowering of the so-called “book” musical, his legacy is rich with pastiche productions, from the 1951 movie classic “An American in Paris” to “My One and Only” (1983), and “Nice Work If You Can Get It” which itself originated at Goodspeed in 2012, to the 2015 hit Broadway adaptation of “An American in Paris.” All of these are highly dance-driven, making the point that among the great American songwriters, Gershwin was perhaps the most rhythmically-charged and the most accomplished at writing for dancers. He’s perhaps the one major theater composer whose work we know mainly from latter day pastiche projects rather than actual book shows.While Mr. Ludwig’s libretto is rip-roaringly funny and different enough to warrant a change of title, perhaps the most memorable manifestation of the “Nervous Wreck”/ “Girl Crazy” plotline is the 1943 MGM Judy Garland vehicle, which altered the plot almost as much as Mr. Ludwig did. Still, I don’t think you’re going to find a funnier or more tuneful show anywhere in the general New York area this summer. It’s still crazy after all these years.

Still ‘Crazy’ After All These Years

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