Broadway could get ‘Crazy’ again
IT played only one night, but the concert version of “Crazy for You” was such infectious fun, there’s talk of a Broadway revival next season. The concert, which Susan Stroman staged Feb. 19 at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, marked the 25th anniversary of “Crazy for You,” which ran four years at the Shubert.
Many shows from the ’80s and ’90s have been revived on Broadway — this season alone had “Cats,” “Miss Saigon” and “Falsettos” — but for inexplicable reasons, no one’s bothered with “Crazy for You.” Word is producer Joey
Parnes, who won a Tony for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” is trying to put together the revival. I hear he’d like to keep the cast from the concert intact. And why not? Leads Laura Osnes and Tony Yazbeck charmed the crowd, while a bunch of first-rate second bananas — including “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” star Rachel Bloom and Rachel Dratch — had everybody in stitches.
“Crazy for You” was one of the first of what would later be called jukebox musicals, although it was a classy one. The score featured songs by George and Ira Gershwin — most of them standards (“Someone To Watch Over Me,” “I Got Rhythm”) — but a few were forgotten gems (“What Causes That?”).
Ken Ludwig (“Lend Me a Tenor”) wrote a snappy script full of one-liners, and Mike Ockrent, riding high from “Me and My Girl,” directed. Ockrent had the bright idea of hiring Stroman, then an up-and-coming choreographer who turned chorus girls into basses in “Slap That Bass” and had the cast erect a house of chairs in “Stiff Upper Lip.”
Ockrent and Stroman fell in love during the show and eventually married. He died of leukemia in 1999, just as they were starting work on “The Producers” with Mel Brooks. Stroman took over the show, which won a record 12 Tonys in 2001. I had lunch the other day with Roger Hor
chow, who produced the original “Crazy for You.” He made his money in the catalog business, selling luxury goods. But he loved the music of George Gershwin, who once played the piano in Horchow’s house.
After selling his business to Neiman Marcus, Horchow decided he wanted to revive the Gershwins’ “Girl Crazy.”
“But I read the script, and it was terrible,” he says. So he teamed up with some seasoned Broadway producers to create what they eventually billed as “the new Gershwin musical comedy.”
“I told them to hire the best people,” he said. His $12 million was well spent.
“Crazy for You” brought musical comedy back to a Broadway dominated for a decade by such British spectacles as “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Misérables.” The American musical, as Frank Rich noted in his 1992 rave, was back in business.