CRAZY FOR YOU
Auditorium Theatre
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George Gershwin was famous for playing songs from his forthcoming musicals at parties–so much so, George S. Kaufman once cracked, “that the first night audience [at a new show] thinks it’s at a revival.” Crazy for You, playing in an eye-popping, tap-happy touring production at the Auditorium, is both a new show and a revival: premiered on Broadway in 1992 under the direction of Mike Ockrent, it’s a broad reworking of the 1930 Broadway hit Girl Crazy, which Gershwin wrote with his lyricist brother Ira and playwrights Guy Bolton and John McGowan (capping a string of lightweight comedies by the Gershwins before they turned to more serious fare like the satiric Of Thee I Sing and the tragic Porgy and Bess). Ken Ludwig, whose Lend Me a Tenor paid tribute to the screwball comedies of the 1920s and ’30s, concocted a new script in a style that was corny and old-fashioned even in the days of Girl Crazy, a trifle about a New York playboy-banker who’s sent to a Wild West mining town to foreclose on an old theater and decides to revive the place instead, importing a follies chorus to stage a musical extravaganza and in the meantime wooing the theater owner’s frisky daughter. But what the script really does is frame 18 great Gershwin tunes–melodically graceful, whimsically romantic, buoyantly syncopated, in short, bursting with freshness and intelligence–and a series of fabulous dance numbers, most featuring a dynamic leading man cum clown named James Brennan.
With a big supporting cast highlighted by the indefatigable Karen Ziemba as the object of Brennan’s affection (the sense of easygoing friendship complicated by sex that he and she project nicely recalls Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain) and Kay McClelland and Christopher Coucill as the vulgar secondary couple, Crazy for You is a spectacular show–but this is spectacle with intelligence thanks to Susan Stroman’s choreography, which grounds its inventive patterns in the psychology of the characters. Enhancing the rich sense of period are Robin Wagner’s sets (including a Manhattan street dotted with neon signs proclaiming the wonders of Planters Peanuts and the Horn and Hardart automat, as well as a gorgeous art deco staircase straight out of a Busby Berkeley movie for the finale) and William Ivey Long’s costumes.
Boasting the star power of Danny Aiello in the lead role of gangster Mike Fransisco and such TV celebrities as Gary Sandy, Karen Valentine, Larry Storch, and the once-fine actor Harry Guardino, Tillinger’s staging plays up the wop-versus-WASP comedy (such as it is) to the point where what should be a delicate, light pasta is beaten to a pulp by heavy hunks of ham. Aiello has genuine vitality onstage but offers no subtlety in his tough-talking, heavily gesticulating characterization; it’s almost as if he considers the play to be so bad that he doesn’t want anyone to think he actually believes in what he’s doing. Valentine is shrill, not sexy, as the aging restaurateur who convinces her father to invest in her inamorato’s play in order to bind him to the family; as the playwright, Sandy is glibly charming but fails to register the character’s growing confidence (the closest thing to dramatic tension the show’s got).
