Crazy For You - Review

Gillian LynneTheatre, London

*****

Music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin

Book by Ken Ludwig

Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman

The company of Crazy For You

Susan Stroman’s Crazy For You was sensational when it opened at Chichester last year. Incredibly, her production has matured with time and on its opening night at the Gilllian Lynne Theatre proves itself as without question the finest musical in town.

This fabulous fusion of the Gershwins’ songs, Stroman’s vision (what that woman can conjure out of rope, pickaxes and corrugated iron defies description!) and a cast led by Charlie Stemp and Carly Anderson creates an evening of flawless musical comedy.

Ken Ludwig’s story, co-created with the late, great Mike Ockrent is a confection of whimsy and fairytale that crisscrosses the United States, defying both rhyme and reason. But fairytales and fantasy are the cornerstones of musical theatre, with Stemp’s Bobby and Anderson’s Polly playing the star-crossed lovers who against all the odds fall for each other, and who are perhaps the most perfectly cast lovers to be found on stage today.

The tunes are the American Songbook’s finest, with classic after classic cascading down from Alan Williams’ loftily perched 17 piece orchestra. Embraceable You, Slap That Bass and But Not For Me are just a handful of the gems on offer, with the jewel in this production’s crown being the first-act closer of I Got Rhythm, which leaves the crowd open-jawed at Stroman’s inspired choreography that reaches new heights with each repeated verse of the song. As at Chichester, the show’s first half ended with a spontaneous standing ovation, such is the overwhelming joy that this show elicits from its audience.

Ludwig’s script is packed with zippy one-liners that all hit the spot - with Tom Edden’s reprisal of his hilarious take on Broadway impresario Bella Zangler proving the evening’s comedy highlight. There’s not a weak link in the cast, with unexpected treats such as Natalie Kassanga’s Naughty Baby defining the depths of talent that Stroman has had to work with.

Beowulf Boritt’s original designs have translated well to the West End and a nod too to Ken Billington’s Broadway-infused lighting, that bathes the production in a rare, rich illumination.

On until January - musical theatre does not get better than this.

Booking until 20th January 2024

Photo credit: Johan Persson

Ken Ludwig In Conversation

Ken Ludwig

Crazy For You opens this month at Chichester Festival Theatre. The musical delivers a fine evening of song and dance and drawn from the composing genius of George and Ira Gershwin, one could be forgiven for thinking that the show is a classic hailing from Broadway’s Golden Age. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. While the songs are in part drawn from the Gershwin’s 1930 show Girl Crazy, it fell to Ken Ludwig (who co-conceived the musical with director Mike Ockrent) to create the book for Crazy for You some 60 years later. The show's Broadway opening in 1992 garnered 3 Tony Awards including Best Musical, with similar honours in the Oliviers a year later on its West End transfer.

Ludwig has been very busy at Chichester recently. His adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express has only recently closed at the Festival Theatre after achieving a slew of rave reviews from across the national press. He is back in Sussex again for Crazy For You and I caught up with him in a break from rehearsals to talk about these remarkable productions.

Charlie Stemp and Carly Anderson rehearsing Crazy For You at Chichester

Ludwig told me how Crazy For You was created. “Back in the early 1990s, a businessman called Roger Horchow called me out of the blue. He had invested in a couple of Broadway shows, but had always wanted to do Gershwin. He called me because I had a show on Broadway at the time called Lend Me A Tenor that was the only real comedy on Broadway at the time and he had really loved it. He told me that he had acquired the rights from the Gershwin Estate and would I write an adaptation of Girl Crazy? 

I told him that I couldn't! Girl Crazy has a terrible book. In fact it’s hardly a book at all, more a bunch of blackout sketches with some glorious songs in it: Embraceable You, I Got Rhythm, But Not For Me. So it had an amazing score, but it was hardly a story at all.

Girl Crazy was loosely about an East Coast guy heading West. Well, I ended up keeping that bit of the story so that I could use a couple of the songs as book songs, like Biding My Time and Could You Use Me, but otherwise I threw it all out and started from scratch. I came up with a story, not entirely unlike Lend Me A Tenor, if you think about it, which is someone who in their heart wants to be in show business, but can't quite make the leap. In the case of Lend Me A Tenor, it’s somebody who is an assistant to a producer. In the case of Crazy For You, he comes from a banking family. His parents force him to be a banker, but he just wants to tap dance and that's Bobby in Crazy For You. So, I wrote the idea, came up with the story, and then Mike Ockrent joined in, we found Susan Stroman to choregraph and we built the musical.”

The company rehearsing Crazy For You at Chichester

I asked Ken to tell me more about Susan Stroman. “Well, Stroman is remarkable. She started out as a choreographer, and was rightly acclaimed for Crazy For You and went onto do other Broadway shows. And then, late in the day, she started directing. She and Mike Ockrent who directed Crazy For You got married and they were doing some shows together, and in fact were hired to do The Producers together, when Mike contracted leukaemia and tragically died so young. And then she took over The Producers and directed that on her own.”

And of course it is Stroman who will be making her much anticipated debut at Chichester this year, as she directs and choreographs this revival of Crazy For You!

Chichester hosted the UK premiere of Murder On The Orient Express earlier this year before a planned transfer to Bath. I asked Ken about his ingenious adaptation of the Agatha Christie classic.

“The Christie Estate came to me and said, "We'd like you to take any one of her novels and put it on stage.  I was very flattered and I said, "Of course I'd be honoured to do it." I chose Murder On The Orient Express without rereading it. I hadn't read it in years. I'd seen the great (1974) Albert Finney movie, but I knew the title was such an iconic title. And I thought, well, in itself it's so romantic, the title's romantic and it's exotic and ought to translate to the stage well.

Then I read the novel soup to nuts and realized this is going to be tricky. It's all virtually, all on the train. So to dramatise it, to make it fun to watch on stage and exciting, and a cliff hanger, I changed two things from the novel.

Firstly, I made the murder happen a great deal later in the piece than it is in the book. If you think in a way that's counterintuitive, as it's the murder that gets the story started, but it's really not. As a dramatist I wanted us to meet the characters and get invested in all those characters on the train, so that we cared about who did it, because until the very end w don't know who did it. Jonathan Church, who directed it so superbly, turned to me at one point and said, "Ken, the murder isn't happening till 45 minutes into the play, are we going to be okay?" And I said, "Well, just hold tight. I think we'll be all right." And it ends up being just that and it works.

The other major change I made is that in the book there are 12 suspects and someone even makes a remark about that and says, "Oh 12, like a British jury." I cut that down to eight suspects because there were just too many people to get to know in the compressed stage time.”

One of the standout features of the play was the set design, and I asked Ken for his thoughts on seeing a play that is, for the most part, set on a train stranded in the Alps, physically brought to the stage.

“When the play first ran in the States there was a beautiful set by Beowulf Boritt who in fact I've worked with several times since, and he's doing Crazy For You here at Chichester now. For the play here, a whole different concept emerged between the two geniuses that I had to work with, who were Jonathan Church and his designer Rob Jones. 

Rob had conceived a whole imaginative way to view the train with the locomotive at the back of the stage and pallets that came on and danced around the stage. And, as you saw, they formed the dining car and then formed the car with all the bedrooms. And so we had to imagine ourselves into the setting in a different way. 

It was all in our mind seeing the pieces of it come together and it was, I have to say, the most beautiful, dramatic set I think I'll ever have in my life. And it helped spur me on to write the new pieces, parts of it that I did, because it was so glorious. Rob’s design, from the early design-box stage, made me think about how that would affect Poirot and the big entrances for Mrs. Hubbard, who is very flamboyant American, and all the characters, little Greta Olson, who's afraid of her own shadow. And it inspired me to rethink the dramatic way to tell the story.

Henry Goodman as Hercule Poirot

And of course Henry Goodman (as Hercule Poirot) was a delight. I have known of Henry’s work for a long while and I find his attention to detail is remarkable. He thinks through the character in depth from the beginning of the play to the end of the play. So when we start working, even when we started on the first day and he was practising the first scene, he knows where he wants to end up emotionally, because he's thought about it so much. He's a real intellect. And his skillset is incredible. So he brings both this remarkable intelligence to every role he does and then is able to embody it, because he has such a great set of acting skills and such a good voice too.”

Crazy For You commences previews in the Chichester Festival Theatre on 11th July, where it runs until 4th September. For tickets click here.  

Me And My Girl - Review

Chichester Festival Theatre, Chichester

****

Music by Noel Gay

Book and lyrics by L Arthur Rose and Douglas Furber

Book revised by Stephen Fry with contributions by Mike Ockrent

Directed by Daniel Evans

Alex Young, Ryan Pidgen and company

A showbiz dream came true at Chichester this week when Matt Lucas, the starring lead of Me And My Girl, had to pull out of the show on doctor’s orders and company member Ryan Pidgen stepped up to the plate to take on the role of Bill Snibson. With barely a couple of hours to rehearse, Pidgen who was warmly received by the Chichester audience, was magnificent delivering an opening night performance that could have been a moment straight out of 42nd Street.

Pidgen may have been the unexpected star of the evening, but in Daniel Evans’ cast he was surrounded by the cream of British musical theatre talent. Opposite him, and in her first major leading role, Alex Young was a convincing and vocally charming Sally Smith. Interestingly, for a leading lady, the show does not give Sally too many singing highlights – but in her one stunning solo of the night, Once You Lose Your Heart, Young proved (yet again, for this website has long been in awe of her talents) why she is one of the finest performers of her generation.

The plot of Me And My Girl is a far-fetched hokum that sees the cockney working-class Snibson discover that he is a landed peer. His newly-realised upper-crust family are horrified by Snibson’s cultural roots and the narrative plays out as Snibson learns to mingle with the aristocracy, while at the same time holding onto his London heritage. There are shades of My Fair Lady in the story, (and even a couple of nods to that musical too in the second half) but where Lerner and Loewe’s foundations lay in a wondrous book, Me And My Girl sits on a far flakier fable. Snibson’s journey is all about old fashioned class and sexual prejudice and while the love between him and Sally is unquestionably deep and sincere, she is reduced to little more than a woman who has to change her role in life to win her man. Elsewhere the excellent Siubhan Harrison is reduced to playing (wonderfully) Lady Jacqueline Carstone, a beautiful aristocrat but a woman with no depth whatsoever. Take a step back and this show is a dated cornucopia of corny cliché and caricature. It is hard to believe that the modern era has seen Stephen Fry (no less) revise the book.

And yet for all its moral flaws, Daniel Evans has fashioned a thing of beauty here, drawn solely from the excellent company that he’s assembled. In supporting roles, Caroline Quentin is the dowager Duchess of Dene, while the venerable Clive Rowe plays Sir John Tremayne – another bumbling toff and the two are simply perfection. Much of the show’s momentum is carried by crass puns and double-entendres which should, by rights, have the audience groaning. Here however they are hilarious, with Evans having drilled his cast to deliver the comedy with split second timing and perfect delivery. There’s a gorgeous twist of role reversal too, as Jennie Dale takes on the role of Parchester, the landed family’s solicitor. Dale (also, always brilliant) shines like a diamond as she tap dances her way through moments of sensational hilarity.

In the pit Gareth Valentine (who not only conducts but has also arranged the show’s score) has taken familiar melodies and revitalised them, as alongside Evans, Alistair David’s choreography is slick, imaginative and impressive.

Me And My Girl’s politics may be of the dark ages – but its ability to put grins on faces and set toes tapping is the mark of a modern show that knows how to please its audience. The talent on stage here is unmatched, and for a seaside festival of song and dance, there’s nothing finer in the country.

Runs until 25th August

Photo credit: Johan Persson

A Christmas Carol - The Musical In Concert

Lyceum Theatre, London


*****


Music by Alan Menken
Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens
Book by Mike Ockrent and Lynn Ahrens
Based on the story by Charles Dickens

Robert Lindsay

Much like a rich brandy butter complements a fine Christmas pudding so too does Dickens’ classic Christmas fable nestle cozily into an Alan Menken score. His tunes are soaring, grand and just a little bit Disney-esque and in a story that’s all about redemption and humanity that’s a perfect fit.

What makes this concert performance of A Christmas Carol all the richer is the sumptuous sound of Freddie Tapner’s 32 piece London Musical Theatre Orchestra playing to support a stellar cast of musical theatre’s finest, alongside a 16 strong chorus. With just a hint of props and costuming, along with Mike Robertson’s ingenious lighting, the imagery of this show lies entirely within the audience’s imagination. 

Reprising his 2016 creation, Robert Lindsay is a gnarled and grizzled Ebenezer Scrooge, blossoming as he journeys to discover compassion and kindness. Lindsay brings a weathered London nuance to Scrooge and what makes his skinflint all the more compelling is that not only is he a top notch actor with immaculate timing and presence, he is also blessed with a stunning musical talent. 

A concert performance of any musical is all about acting through song and the assembled talent playing to a packed Lyceum offer a masterclass. In what is, probably, the UK’s definitive Bob Cratchit for the 2017 season, Michael Xavier delivers a cracking combination of power and pathos. Xavier knows the subtleties of working a massive West End crowd into an atmosphere of intimacy - and that he manages to capture the tragedy of Tiny Tim’s graveside aided only by Menken’s music is testimony to his craft,

The company’s other Christmas cracker is Sophie-Louise Dann as Mrs Fezziwig. The show’s writers have (mercifully) trimmed the original tale and where once the Fezziwigs were focal to the narrative of not only the Ghost of Christmas Past but also the Christmas Present phantom, here they play in just the historical chapter. Dann however relishes every word, lighting up the stage with a fabulous flamboyance.

In chronological order the three Christmas Ghosts, are played by Gemma Sutton, Hugh Maynard and Lucie Jones. Sutton manages what is in effect a therapy session for the old man, perfectly. As she whirls Robert Lindsay through Scrooge’s troubled childhood, bereft of love, the pair bring a sad, beautiful resonance to The Lights of Long Ago.

Maynard crowned in a holly wreath brings a haunting gusto to the stage, though it is the silent veiled Jones, signalling Scrooge’s impending doom that truly chills. A doubling up in the cast however does allow Jones (as Emily) a beautiful duet with Young Ebenezer (Cameron Potts), A Place Called Home, sung when the two were married many years ago.

Throughout, Tapner’s casting proves a delight. Glenn Carter brings an ugly yet compellingly youthful virility to Jacob Marley - rarely has this miserably spectre been played out so appealingly. Carter’s big solo Link By Link is Menken and Ahrens at their wickedest. Rebecca Lock and Nicholas Colicos turn in similarly top-notch cameos as Mrs Cratchit and Mr Fezziwig.

And the kids are professionally cute too. Tobias Ungleston is a cracking Tiny Tim, while Aaron Gelkoff who plays a number of Dickensian juveniles through the evening brings a beautifully voiced chutzpah to the stage that is made for Menken. Nods too to young Sylvia Erskine and Ivy Pratt, both also on top form.

When the show premiered in New York in 1994, it was to famously and festively return for ten subsequent sold out seasons. Lindsay makes this iteration of the timeless tale his own, and free of the wizardry of stage-crafted special effects, resting solely on the talents of its cast and orchestra, this musical concert becomes an enchantment.

Returns to the Lyceum for one further performance on Monday 18th December.