CRAZY FOR YOU
Music: George Gershwin
Lyrics: Ira Gershwin
Libretto: Ken Ludwig, based on the 1930 musical “Girl Crazy” by the Gershwin brothers
Premieres:
Broadway: 19 February 1992
West End: 3 March 1993
ROMA Musical Theatre: 29 January 1999
The brilliant composer George Gershwin and his talented lyricist brother Ira wrote nearly 20 musicals together during the time known as the Golden Age of Broadway – the 1920s and 1930s. If the dozens of songs they wrote for their shows were collected together, they would warrant an important separate chapter in what’s known as the Great American Songbook – the collection of timeless standards still performed and recorded today by stars from the worlds of both pop and jazz music. One of their shows was the musical “Girl Crazy” (1930), which forms the basis for this modern production of CRAZY FOR YOU, though with a new libretto by Ken Ludwig. The original show contains such songs as “Embraceable You”, “I Got Rhythm” and “But Not For Me” but the producers of CRAZY FOR YOU have also included songs from other shows and placed the classic greatest hits of the Gershwin brothers in an entertaining new story.
What they have created, though, is a musical and not just a review of hits, mainly thanks to the clever plot – which retains the style of the 1930s but is aimed at modern audiences. It’s truly extraordinary to think that CRAZY FOR YOU won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 1992… 55 years after the death of the composer! Frank Rich, the renowned theatre critic of the New York Times, wrote after its premiere: “When future historians try to find the exact moment at which Broadway finally rose up to grab the musical back from the British, they just may conclude that the revolution began last night.” And it’s true – during the defence of the American musical against the invasion of European producers on the stages of Broadway (Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude-Michel Schönberg), the best approach turned out to be going back to the classics, to the times when it was Broadway that showed the whole world what musicals really were. And this was a period defined by the work of the Gershwins.
Broadway’s revenge was all the more emphatic in view of the fact that the London production of CRAZY FOR YOU, which opened a year after its New York premiere, ran in the West End for three whole years, picking up 3 Olivier Awards along the way (with the 2011 revival winning a further two). The musical continues to be performed in many countries around the world, which is the best proof possible of the timelessness of George Gershwin’s music, but it doesn’t only show us how Broadway looked (or might have looked) in the years before World War II. Above all, it recreates the atmosphere of the joyful, dancing, carefree times back then – the wild and crazy times of the old movies.
Selected songs: “I Got Rhythm”, “Nice Work If You Can Get It” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”.