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It took a lot of smarts to create a gloriously mindless musical like Crazy For You. That's a salute, not a put-down. The concept (yes, a mindless show with a concept) is brilliant. First, get your show the best score on Broadway-20 or so death-defying songs by George and Ira Gershwin. Next, don't make it a painfully perky revival or a strained updating of an old show. Make it-well, make it "Crazy For You," the newest old musical you've ever seen.
The show's co-conceivers are English director Mike Ockrent and American playwright Ken Ludwig. Both have a thing for the '30s, which figured in Ockrent's 1986 revival of a classic English musical, "Me and My Girl," and in Ludwig's 1989 Broadway farce, "Lend Me a Tenor." Ludwig has taken the silly book of the Gershwins' 1930 "Girl Crazy" and mutated it into something so transcendentally absurd that it becomes pure joy. The hero, Bobby (Harry Groener), spurns the family banking business to pursue his dreams of becoming a Broadway star. His mother dispatches him to Deadrock, a moribund Nevada mining town, to foreclose on a theater. Instead he falls for the theater owner's daughter (Jodi Benson), who spurns the city boy. So Bobby disguises himself as the great Broadway producer Zangler (read Ziegfeld) and puts on a show to save the theater.
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The result is something without reason but with rhyme, such rhymes as: "I'll tie your shoesies and chase your bluesies." In other words, we're back in the lost paradise of the American musical, with glitter and girls, legs and voices, melodies of insouciant mastery. These include some from "Girl Crazy"-"Embraceable You," "I Got Rhythm"-plus several sanctified by Fred Astaire, like "Shall We Dance" and "They Can't Take That Away From Me." The enthralling songs and the appalling gags ("I didn't come here to be insulted!" "No? Where do you usually go?") combine in an atmosphere of pure innocent energy that seems to say: "Don't worry. Don't think. World War II may never come. Sondheim is gurgling in his diapers. Relax and enjoy."
This is a big show, $7.5 million worth. A lot of that went to Robin Wagner's sets, which manage to be both amusing and beautiful, from his cubistic jumble of Broadway signs to a Deadrock that slowly assembles itself in all its torpor. In her first major Broadway venture, choreographer Susan Stroman fills the stage with wit and the true American crazy rhythm. Her turbocharged dancers pour from a limousine in surreal profusion, their pink mini-tutus vibrating with dance fever. Brilliant with props, she turns "I Got Rhythm" into a human kaleidoscope interacting with pickaxes, miners' hats, a saw, a bicycle pump, a plunger and a stageful of metal pans on which the women tap away with manic jubilation. Stroman seems poised to join Tommy Tune in filling the vacuum left by the deaths of Michael Bennett, Bob Fosse and Gower Champion. Her work reclaims the primal energy of the embattled American musical.
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