Crazy for the Gershwins
Fri 10 Nov 2017Crazy For You is both a fairly new musical, and an old one. It was first performed in 1992, but its music and lyrics go all the way back to the 1930s, regarded by many as the Golden Age of the musical.
The high esteem in which this period is held by aficionados has much to do with two men – brothers George and Ira Gershwin. With younger brother George as composer and elder Ira as lyricist, they were responsible for some of the most memorable songs of the twentieth century, including They Can’t Take That Away From Me, I Got Rhythm and Nice Work If You Can Get It (all of which, incidentally, feature in Crazy For You). They also (along with DuBose Heyward) were responsible for the ‘folk opera’ Porgy And Bess. As if that wasn’t enough, George even composed orchestral music, including the renowned Rhapsody In Blue.
The brothers grew up in New York, the children of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Younger brother George had his first hit in 1919, two years before Ira began working in the music business. Their first hit came in 1924 with the Broadway musical comedy Lady Be Good. The two continued to work together, on scores for both stage and screen, until until George died of a brain tumour at the age of just 38.
Photo by Richard Davenport
Crazy For You is largely based on the brothers’ 1930 work Girl Crazy, with added songs from other Gershwin brothers work, including the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Shall We Dance (the original source of the song They Can’t Take That Away From Me.) It’s appropriate that a song from a Rogers and Astaire film became part of Crazy For You, as it was the Broadway production of Girl Crazy that first brought Ginger Rogers to public prominence.
The musical tells the story of Bobby (played in this production by Tom Chambers, a Strictly Come Dancing winner) a wannabe performer whose stage ambitions are disapproved of by his rich banking family. They send him to close down an in-debt theatre in the American West. Leaving behind his fiancée Irene (Claire Sweeney, last seen on our stage as the Baroness in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) Bobby heads for Nevada, where he promptly falls in love with the daughter of the man who owns the theatre he is supposed to be closing down. Can Bobby win the girl of his dreams and save the theatre? (And escape Irene!) As in all the best musicals, you’ll need to wait until the final song to find out!
Crazy For You: Tuesday 16 to Saturday 20 January.