New Year’s Eve is two months away, but the party’s on at the Auditorium Theatre.
The musical “Crazy for You” is like a leap into a giant champagne vat, one where you can splash around for hours, gulp whole mouthfuls to near dizziness, but still leave clearheaded and guilt-free, with no fear of a hangover.
In borrowing a whisper of the original plot for the 1930 “Girl Crazy,” in tossing in five Gershwin brothers’ songs from that show and nine others from their incomparable canon, and then mixing it all into a spectacle drawn from our collective memory of decades of entertainment, the creators of “Crazy for You” lushly offer the old and new simultaneously.
It’s as if the nation’s long infatuation with nostalgia finds perfect fruition at last. Said to be neither the campy putdown of “Dames at Sea” nor the relentless blitz of “42nd Street,” “Crazy for You” is really both, and more, a cavalcade mixing vaudeville, ’30s black-and-white movies, follies splendor, schmaltz, television variety show, a smidgen of circus acrobatics and a final Art Deco staircase winding to a paradise invented by the dreammaking of mainstream American entertainment.
Along the way, “Crazy for You” calls up both ’30s Hollywood and ’50s Broadway in a cocksure fashion that should touch older audiences and win those whose fandom was born from cast albums, reruns, videos and legend.
Michael Ockrent, the steamrolling director of “Me and My Girl”; choreographer Susan Stroman; and book author Ken Ludwig provide a corny show that begins as a serenade to the Gershwins and finds ways to slip in Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire, Flo Ziegfeld and even a hint of the likes of Soupy Sales. In a work that calls to mind every backstage story you’ve ever endured, there are dance references from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s and even a late, sly tweek at the golden chairs of “Grand Hotel” and the whipping red flag of “Les Miserables.”
With it, Stroman’s reputation rightfully leaped to the highest; she and Ockrent work superbly together to craft a series of breathless tap-dancing spectacles without wearying the viewer, or without losing focus on the sweetness and small human emotions so key in the best of the old Hollywood show biz yarns.
The creamy romantic splendor of “Shall We Dance?” gives way to a clownish take in “Embraceable You” and a first act finale as fine as they get: “I’ve Got Rhythm,” ingeniously built on the plinks and plonks of shovels, pounding hammers, pickaxes and rolls of roof tin.
Act Two includes a Lucille Ball-Harpo Marx dress-alike vaudeville routine for “What Causes That?” (an entertaining song unearthed from the Secaucus, N.J., warehouse find) and a serpentine, ribald duet for “Naughty Baby.” Stroman and Ockrent rarely flag in detail or in honing in for the soft touch (as with “But Not for Me”) or in giving free rein to Ludwig’s relentless string of recycled jokes and set-up putdowns.
The touring company’s large ensemble is close to flawless. James Brennan, as Bobby Child, the rich kid, is a powder keg, echoing Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin and even Astaire in his ceaseless energy, rubbery limbs, fluid grace and charm. As Polly, the tomboyish mining girl, Karen Ziemba is beautifully voiced and perfectly cast, whirling in Brennan’s arms as if she belonged there always.
“Crazy” was toasted in 1991 as a new beginning. It’s more like the end of a long nostalgic trail, the perfect tribute to a songbook and style of showmanship that, if there’s a God, will stubbornly prove immortal.
———-
“Crazy for You” is playing through Nov. 21 at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress Pkwy., Chicago. Phone 312-902-1500.
