Crazy for You: A Rough Guide for the M.D.
June 10, 2024
How did Crazy for You come to be?
Crazy for You is part of a major groundswell of popular interest in Gershwin that started in the early 1980s, and crested in the early 1990s, right when Crazy for You opened.
“IT WOULDN’T BE SURPRISING if future pop historians, looking back on 1987, expressed more interest in the accelerating popularity of George Gershwin than in Michael Jackson’s changing physiognomy or Bruce Springsteen’s romantic maturation.”
– Stephen Holden The New York Times, Jan 17, 1988
A list of Gershwin events might bring things into focus:
1982 Discovery of Gershwin materials in Warner Warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey including Primrose and Pardon My English
1983 Ira Gershwin dies
1983 The Uris Theatre renamed the Gershwin
1983 My One And Only on Broadway
1984 Rhapsody in Blue played on 84 grand pianos at the Olympics Opening Ceremony in LA
1985 Rhapsody in Blue, Second Rhapsody (Michael Tilson Thomas)
1985 Porgy and Bess (Leonard Slatkin)
1986 CBS Masterworks re-releases Bernstein’s recordings of Rhapsody in Blue and American in Paris
1986 The Birth of Rhapsody in Blue Concert Reconstruction released
1987 Of Thee I Sing/Let Them Eat Cake concert and recording (Michael Tilson Thomas)
1987 CBS Releases Classic Gershwin! Compilation
1987 Rhapsody in Blue recorded with Gershwin’s piano roll (Michael Tilson Thomas)
1987 Pure Gershwin Album (Michael Feinstein)
1987 Dinner with Gershwin Single (Donna Summer)
1987 Two 90 minute PBS Documentaries air
1987 Kiri Sings Gershwin (John McGlinn conducting)
1987 Gershwin Overtures (John McGlinn conducting)
1987 Gershwin Biography by Edward Jablonsky released
1987 Lady Be Good! Production at the Goodspeed
1987 Concert of Primrose and Pardon My English at the Library of Congress
New York Times review singles out Naughty Baby
1987 Gershwin Gala at Brooklyn Academy of Music
1988 Menuhin and Grapelli Play Gershwin
1988 Washington post runs article: The Gershwin Glut- How Glorious
1988 Marni Nixon Sings Gershwin
1988 Lyrics on Several Occasions Re-released
1988 Rhapsody in Blue published in Full Score by Eulenburg
1988 An American Rhapsody: The Story of George Gershwin published
1988 Second Rhapsody, I got Rhythm Variations, etc. (Katia & Marielle Labeque)
1989 Porgy and Bess (Simon Rattle)
1989 Oh Kay! Production at the Goodspeed
1989 Naughty Baby (Maureen McGovern)
1989 Project to print scholarly editions of Gershwin shows announced
1989 Pops By George (John Williams and the Boston Pops)
1990 Girl Crazy reconstruction and recording (John Mauceri)
1990 Oh, Kay! Revival on Broadway
1990 Prince plays Summertime in a soundcheck
1990 Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra (Leonard Slatkin)
1991 The Gershwins in Hollywood (John Mauceri)
1991 The Gershwin Connection (Dave Gruisin)
1991 Strike Up The Band reconstruction and recording (John Mauceri)
1992 Lady Be Good (Eric Stern)
1992 Fascinating Rhythm: Capitol sings George Gershwin compilation album released
1992 Crazy for You Broadway
1993 Crazy for You West End
1993 Blue Monday reconstruction and recording (Marin Alsop)
1993 Pardon My English reconstruction and recording (Eric Stern)
1993 Gershwin Preludes arrangement on Eric Stoltzman album (Eric Stern)
1993 Gershwin Piano Roll Realizations Volumes 1 and 2
1993 Rhapsody in Blue, American in Paris, Catfish Row (James Levine)
1994 Oh Kay reconstruction and recording (Eric Stern)
In the midst of this full scale Gershwin revival, and after the success of the 1987 revival of Anything Goes, it made sense for producers to look for a Gershwin show that could also be revived, and Girl Crazy is the most obvious candidate. The more artistically significant musicals, Strike Up The Band, Of Thee I Sing and Let Them Eat Cake are ambitious and sprawling musicals where the songs are telling the story very specifically. Listening to them debunks the old fairy tale about Rodgers and Hammerstein inventing the integrated musical in 1943. Anything Goes can be completely reorganized, the book rewritten, songs moved around, and it holds up, because the non-specificity of the material lends itself to updating. Of Thee I Sing can’t. For all intents and purposes, it’s a jazz age operetta, maybe even more integrated than Show Boat or Oklahoma.
Unlike these later shows, Girl Crazy is a prime candidate for rewriting. The book is co-written by Guy Bolton, who had also co-written Anything Goes. Girl Crazy’s score also introduced Embraceable You, But Not For Me, and most iconically, I Got Rhythm. The other shows don’t have such a record of hits.
But as it turns out Girl Crazy is not as easily revisable as Anything Goes had been. A brand new book needed to be written, and Ken Ludwig was chosen for the task. In an interview in 2022, Ludwig explains:
“When I read the old libretto to Girl Crazy, I realized that it was creaky and outdated, so I created a whole new story. I had absolute free rein to do what I wanted, and I didn’t feel any obligation to stick to Girl Crazy at all. In fact, the only really important thing I did retain was the idea of an easterner going west.“
In addition to those 3 iconic standards, Crazy for You uses 3 utility numbers from Girl Crazy. These are the parts that place the musical in the American Southwest.
Four more songs in Crazy for You were drawn from the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress, which Gershwin had been working on when he died. I Can’t Be Bothered Now, Stiff Upper Lip, Things are Looking Up, and Nice Work if You Can Get It appeared first in this movie. Bobby’s show biz-oriented stuff almost all comes from Fred Astaire’s songs from this film.
Three songs and an instrumental interlude come from another 1937 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicle, Shall We Dance. I will discuss these below in the context of the show.
Two songs; the title song K-r-a-z-y for You and What Causes That are from 1928’s Treasure Girl. Polly is also a character name from Treasure Girl.
One song, Someone To Watch Over Me, comes from 1926’s Oh, Kay!
Another, Naughty Baby, comes from 1924’s Primrose.
The Real American Folk Song was the very first Gershwin song to appear on Broadway, in 1918’s Ladies First.
Stairway to Paradise appears without lyrics in Crazy for You. It had originally appeared in George White’s Scandals in 1922.
Ken Ludwig had wanted to include Our Love is Here To Stay, the last song Gershwin wrote before his death, but he couldn’t figure out how to make it work in the story. I suspect it may have at one point been in the show as number 16. Ludwig enjoyed the process of converting the show so well, he later wrote an as-yet-unproduced adaptation of Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade.
Structurally, the book to Crazy for You is strikingly similar to Ludwig’s other plays, setting up jokes and knocking them down as we work our way through a farce superstructure that feels somehow familiar, even though almost nobody ever uses it anymore. As the show runs, you may find yourself shaking your head at how well some of these very old Vaudeville style routines work.
The familiarity of it all may obscure some very clever things Ludwig does to the musical material, which the writers of modern jukebox musicals would do well to study. For example, Ludwig is rarely content to let a song function at face value. Complete songs are used as transitions, snippets of songs function as verses to set up even better songs, and sometimes a number of verses are reduced to just the ones that suit the setup best. Famous songs sometimes don’t even get a lyric. Stairway to Paradise functions very specifically in the show, even though the lyric is never sung. Creators of Jukebox musicals would do well to examine Ludwig’s method here.
After a song has made its point, Ludwig hands the reins to the choreographer, and Stro does some of her best musical storytelling here, adding the ballet storytelling of Agnes DeMille into the musical world that chronologically preceded her groundbreaking work. This is a show that uses quite a lot of dance to tell the story, which makes the inclusion of so much Fred Astaire material so apt.
DIGRESSION: There is an old narrative that Rodgers and Hammerstein revolutionized the American musical by ‘integrating’ the songs with the story, using the songs to advance the plot. This framing centers Rodgers and Hammerstein as the creators of the subsequent ‘golden era’. Again, songs integrated into story is as old as music theatre itself. It actually goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks. What makes Oklahoma! such an important show is not the integration of song into story but the elevation of dance to a central narrative role in a sung genre, something truly novel that even opera doesn’t explore to its fullest potential. If we were to truly understand this dynamic, we would recover the stories and importance of women in the creation of these shows, because women created both the choreography and the dance arrangements for many important shows in this era.
What we have in Crazy for You is a show with the same goals as a real 20s-30s Broadway show, but with completely updated pacing and mechanics, reflecting 50 years of progress in musical storytelling, efficiently deploying music, lyrics and dance to ground the storytelling and advance the narrative.
What makes this score sound so authentically Gershwin?
To explore this question, we need to understand some of the things that make up our modern conception of Gershwin’s sound, we will want to examine what Gershwin’s sound was really like in 1930, when Girl Crazy first hit the boards, then how that sound came to change, as reflected in Gershwin’s concert works and in big band arrangements of his music. In the videos below I examine the people involved in Crazy for You, why they were so well qualified to write in Gershwin’s manner. I’ll end by looking at an important example of Gershwin’s own influences. These questions provide an important cultural context for Crazy for You, but they also intersect with some larger elements of the changing landscape of American popular culture. I’ve converted my introductory thoughts into a couple of long-form videos so I can demonstrate what I’m talking about.
Should your Organization do this show?
Nobody should program this show without a strong pit in mind. Tap shows need to be sustained by an overwhelming amount of musical energy, and it is exhausting to try to wring that energy from an undersized pit. At the end of this post, I give what advice I can about who to hire.
Nobody should do this show without a very strong group of dancers. The show is wall-to-wall tapping, and it’s not the kind of show you learn how to tap in. This is closer to 42nd Street than Thoroughly Modern Millie.
From a technical standpoint, it is possible to design a simpler version than the original specifications. We had very large set pieces for the Deadrock sequences, with a trick cuckoo clock, a car from which many dancers could emerge, and a section of the stage that hydraulically lifted at the end MGM style. The scene changes in the original production must have happened fast, because the scene change music is very brief. I will flag the places in the show where you are not likely to have enough music. I wrote brief connecting material for my production, but if you’re not in a position to do the same, you will want to be somewhat involved in the set discussions, so you can be aware of how challenging these transitions will be.
When it’s firing on all pistons, it’s hard to beat Crazy for You in terms of pleasing a large audience.
Before You Start:
- Listen to the Original Broadway Cast Recording and the London Cast Recording
- Watch the Papermill Playhouse production, which reproduces many details of the original production https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QxG8hTz5M0
The Piano Conductor Score
This score is reduced by Tams stalwart Dale S. Kugel. Kugel was, I am told, very well liked by his colleagues, but is the bane of rehearsal accompanists, because of his comically awkward reductions. His scores are always very well laid out, visually aesthetically pleasing, and relatively error free, and they always include all the relevant information needed to conduct. They also include, via note size and other indications, a way one might play the important notes with a single pianist. These indications are often hilariously impossible to execute (I’ve posted a number of TikToks about this) Sometimes they foreground unimportant information the onstage performer doesn’t need to hear, and downplay much more prominent musical cues. As I go through the show, I’ll be pointing out some of these issues. This show should be just as easy to play as a Rodgers and Hammerstein or Cole Porter show, but the reductions make it Jason Robert Brown level difficulty, and you will be hard-pressed to sight-read it.
Casting the Show
With only a couple exceptions, nothing in Crazy for You is musically above average in difficulty for the cast. The 2nd act Finale is difficult, but easily simplified. The tapping is what will kill you. The Trio and the Follies girls will ideally have good ears to sing the harmony, but the Follies girls parts could even be simplified if you found the three part harmony impossible, or the chorus can assist from the wings. The men’s trio also requires good ears, and isn’t as easily simplified (see below)
Polly
Polly should be an excellent dancer and a very good singer. Good comic timing is necessary as well. I’m afraid I find Jodi Benson’s performance perplexingly mannered in the original cast, and I don’t recommend it as a model. Somebody with a good belt and ability to mix can have a lot of fun with it, and it can be a surprisingly moving role for such a silly show.
Bobby
Bobby is a high baritone or tenor who has a great deal of tapping and needs excellent comic timing. Bobby and Polly carry the show, and it’s a LONG night for both audience and the actor if they aren’t up to the task, or aren’t likeable.
Everett
Everett has only a tiny bit to sing, so you should cast an actor who reads older and can deliver his repeated nostalgic line amusingly
Irene
Irene is not a large role, but it is an important one, with a great song and some nice scene work. If you cast Irene well, there’s a lot of wonderful material in Act II. We had a very fine actor in this role, and the comic scenes were really strong.
Zangler
Ideally your Zangler is a similar body and facial type to your Bobby, but that’s not strictly necessary, the pantomime and number in act 2 is just as funny if they’re slightly mis-matched. Zangler sings only one song.
Lank
The name Lank comes from the original Girl Crazy script, where he is also the antagonist. Lank is not a singing part, but should read a little menacing and have comic timing. Imagine if Judd from Oklahoma were something of a comedy role.
Patricia
A small comic part with manageable vocals, needs to pair well with Eugene
Eugene
Again, not a large part or a difficult sing, but a very nice comic role.
Cowboy Trio
The Trio numbers are delightful and somewhat hard to hear, harmonically. You should pick singers who can hear interior parts well; a college a cappella culture will furnish lots of options if you can get them to audition. Ideally one of them plays the guitar a little. It isn’t terribly hard. One of them might play the upright bass, although that can easily be mimed.
Male Quartet
In the dramatis personae at the top of the show, this looks like it might be as involved as the trio, but in fact, this quartet sings and dances in Irene’s Naughty Baby, and only goes into 2 parts.
Follies Girls
You need excellent dancers, primarily, but the core group does also have some tricky 3 part harmony, especially in Nice Work if You Can Get It.
Chorus
The chorus is like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus, in the sense that the women are all one type (showgirls) and the men are all another (cowboys). Get some good dancers who can match pitch and all will be well.
General Notes: The notation of swing in this show is extremely inconsistent. But most of your pit players are going to go home and work through their books listening to cast recordings, which is honestly a much more efficient way of getting the nuances across than telling the players what is swung and what isn’t. I ran the cast recordings in my car for a few months ahead of the first rehearsal and got a good sense of what was meant where.
Going Through the Show Number by Number
A. Overture
This Overture is terrific, particularly if you hired great players. I find these metronome markings unnecessarily fussy; for the first 98 measures, the pulse is between 122 and 138, and the shifts feel like L’istesso tempo.
There is an error in Trombone 1 in measure 10, those should be F and G, not Eb and F. Measure 15 should be marked 4/4, measure 19 back in Cut Time. I went back into a 4 pattern at 100-a, back into 2 at 115. Whenever that pattern at 115 happens, you are in an accelerando that leads you into the 4 of Stairway to Paradise.
No. B Incidental: Before Opening
I will confess to being bewildered by the inclusion of this optional number, (letter?) since it’s the top of the show and there’s no need to change a set.
No. 1 Opening: K-ra-zy For You
The title song of the show is rather a trifle, and it’s so short it barely feels like a complete song. It comes from 1929’s Treasure Girl, where it had a verse almost as long as the song itself, and a second chorus with a different lyric.
In the Bobby/Tess/Zangler scene that happens between measures 22 and 55, if you’ve timed it right, there’s a little lull right before measure 56, and the sudden 4 bars of forte sits right there. See if you can get that to line up with the actors as they rehearse. The safety repeat from 72 to 87 is unlikely to be used. Explain to the band how to jump to 88 for the vocal.
If the choreographer is hewing close to the original choreography, the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm in the tap is what will lead you back into 119, and you’ll time the button for the ‘bits’ of ‘two bits’.
The scene change at the end of the number is one of the only scene changes in the show that is almost certain to fill the change. More on that to follow.
No. 2 I Can’t be Bothered Now
The first substantial number in the show comes from A Damsel in Distress, where it was originally sung (and tapped) by Fred Astaire. It was also the first big number in My One and Only. To me the song’s short phrases seem tailor made to Astaire’s voice, which was never great at long vocal lines. In the film, Astaire taps through traffic, ending the song by jumping onto a passing bus.
Perhaps in an homage to that original usage, Crazy for You includes a car onstage, from which the Follies Girls emerge. Getting that car built will either be the delight of your technical crew or the death of them, and perhaps both.
Conduct measures 64 and 65 as one big 3/2 bar.
Measures 78 through 87 are one of Dale S. Kugel’s unnecessarily elaborate keyboard figurations. In rehearsal, play the stems-up right hand figure and the bass, but leave out the arpeggiations in 79, 81, 83 and 85. The brass part in the right hand of 86 and the bass are far more important than the woodwind figure Kugel wants you to play.
There is an error in measures 92 and 95 in the Piano Conductor score. The third beat in each of those measures should be an F, not a G in the left hand.
136 through 139 are really fun for the band, but they can get a little sluggish if you’re not careful. All the descending chromatics might drag, keep an ear out.
No. 2 continued Playoff: Bothered
My only complaint about this is that if you’re playing from the reduction, it seems like the same 2 measures 6 times, when in fact, it actually builds to the end. If you play the ink on the page, someone may ask you to cut something because it’s so boring. Tell them to wait until the sitz.
Scene Change: After Bothered
This is the first scene change that’s liable to be too long for the music. I feel as though measures 1-4 can really only be played 4 times through before it starts to feel like something is amiss. Measure 15/16 (which is one measure) is mis-notated, although it will make sense once you explain it to the band. Your rall. that began in measure 13 has slowed so much by measure 15, that 1 measure of the new 4/4 has the same beat duration as the old cut time. In other words, measure 15/16 should be in 4/4, and the rhythm and beat pattern should feel like measures 13-14 felt. This sets up measure 17 well. The tuba/piccolo duet in measures 17 and 18 is a hilarious detail, you’ll be delighted to have a tuba if you can get one.
No. 3 Bidin’ My Time
This is the first number in the show that’s from Girl Crazy. In Girl Crazy, this group is a quartet, not a trio, but it also reappears several times in the show. The harmony in this version is a little more elaborate, despite having fewer voices. It is very unlikely these days that your actors will be aware of this style of singing, but the model is the Sons of the Pioneers. The 1934 recording of their signature song “The Tumbling Tumbleweeds” is an ideal style example. Cole Porter’s song “Don’t Fence Me In” is another example of this genre, and was actually introduced by Roy Rodgers and the Sons of the Pioneers.
The high tenor part is on the top of the lower staff, the lowest part is on the bottom of the lower staff, and the lead melodic part is the middle part rangewise, notated on the top staff. If you have any experience with barbershop singing, you’ll recognize it immediately.
Polly’s line, “Mail Call!” in measure 17 b should be timed if possible. That interlude is meant to feel a little long, but if Polly comes in too early or too late, the break feels interminable.
No. 3a Incidental: Bobby Staggers In
An easy enough cue. Try and line up Bobby’s fall with the musical cue if possible.
No. 4 Things are Looking Up
A second number from A Damsel in Distress, also originally sung by Astaire. The number doesn’t get the up-tempo treatment in the film, and the music takes a back-seat to Astaire’s dancing with Joan Fontaine. Here, Ludwig sets up the joke of instantly falling in love, then uses the rest of the tune as a kind of scene change to get us into Lank’s saloon.
The third note of the piano arpeggio in the first measure should be an A, not a B flat. Get used to conducting that figure in three, you’ll do it a few times in the show.
No. 4a Incidental: After Things
The joke of this number is that after a long scene change with the same annoying honky tonk music, Lank tells them to shut the player piano off, and this scene change ends. You may discover rather late that your pianist has trouble playing the stride piano part at this speed, especially over and over again. It’s an extremely challenging piano part and likely a very long scene change. I think everyone might be happier if you pre-recorded it with a tack piano, maybe even slowly speeding it up to relieve the monotony. A joke is a joke, but this scene change really overstays its welcome and wears out the pianist. You could also improvise a B section, as our pianist Chris Burcheri did very effectively each night.
No. 5 Could You Use Me?
This is the second number that originated in Girl Crazy. Do yourself a favor and watch Mickey and Judy do it in the 1943 film. This version is much shorter; essentially the best lyrics of the batch, because it’s used as a kind of verse to Shall We Dance? Gershwin’s verses are always so musically interesting that this delightful number credibly serves as a verse in this case.
The string section at the top requires 6 violins and 2 cellos to do well. I rewrote it for 3 violins and one cello, bringing in the bass at points. If you are using the string synth book, you don’t have this problem, but you miss the delightful slide from measure 2 into 3.
The marimba part in measure 21 is wildly in the wrong key. It should be a minor 3rd lower, (in F) through the end of the number.
No. 5 cont. Shall we Dance?
This is the title song, and Crazy for You’s first selection from the 1937 film Shall We Dance?, in which Astaire dances with Ginger Rogers and 14 Ginger Rogers look alikes with Ginger Rogers masks. The sequence is quite astonishing!
This is the first really substantial dance break in the show, but it isn’t impossible. Measures 63 and 64 really should be marked in 4. Measures 65 through 69 are probably going to line up with some visual cues. I believe the F flats in the piano left hand in 66 and 68 are in error. The recordings have F natural, and it sounds more idiomatic that way.
Something to keep track of: The passage beginning in 113 happens almost verbatim in Nice Work if You Can Get It, but the dance moment is a little different. For our production, this first version of the passage was just a hair slower than the one in Act II.
One of the cast recordings cuts measures 150 and 151, and you may want to as well.
Measure 170 may wind up being quite slow, and that molto accel. in 174 is not observed in some prominent recordings and videos of this dance break. Your choreographer may want those to be in strict tempo, dropping into the Vivo quickly. The nice thing about that is that it may set up a very clear l’istesso tempo from 175 to 176, where the old quarter equals the new half note. There will likely be some visual cueing at the end of the number as well.
No. 5a Scene Change: Shall We Dance
I don’t know whether this was Ken Ludwig’s idea or somebody else on the production, but using a music-box version of Shall We Dance to get us into the theater is a wonderful theatricla touch, setting up both the nostalgia of the place and the idea that Polly was raised in it. A celesta will get us back into the theater in Act II as well, but then it will be K-R-A-Z-Y for You that’s played. More on that later.
No. 6 Girls Enter Nevada [Bronco Busters]
This number is technically from Girl Crazy as well, but it’s been totally reorganized. The title lyric, “Bronco Busters” doesn’t even appear. (this lyric wouldn’t really function in this show). The section that remains is boilerplate girls chorus material. There’s no Cure Like Travel/Bon Voyage from Anything Goes is exactly the same sort of thing.
Again Crazy for You uses a trifling song from Girl Crazy to set up a classic, in this case Stairway to Paradise, which always accompanies Bobby as Zangler, and never uses the lyric. Stairway to Paradise is in a family of songs that are associated with the extravagant showgirl sections of large scale reviews like the Ziegfeld Follies. A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody is the most famous example, and Sondheim is pastiching this kind of song in Beautiful Girls from Follies.
When Crazy for You opened, there was just enough cultural memory for a large portion of the audience to associate this kind of tune with lavish showbusiness, perfect to demonstrate Bobby’s newfound confidence in his disguise. But the lyric would actually get in the way of that association. Today most of the audience won’t make this connection, but the overwhelming panache of the orchestration, with its screaming high trumpet line and swagger may do the trick even without any living memory of Ziegfeld.
You may need to buy some scene change time here. You can repeat measures 5 and 6, and then 7 and 8, making your accelerando more gradual, and that ought to get you a little scene change time.
Conducting measure 43 in the new tempo of the upcoming 2/4 is really helpful. It does not appear on the cast recordings.
There is a lyric error on pages 71 and 72. The men should read “Out here where there’s no doubt that men are men”, not “They don’t care if they don’t go east again”. It appears the correct way on the cast recordings, and if you do it as written, the men seem to be saying that out East, men are men, which is surely the opposite of what they intend to say here.
No. 7 Someone To Watch Over Me
This song comes from 1927’s Oh, Kay. It was originally written as an uptempo, but it has come to be known as a ballad, and one of the best known Gershwin standards. (if you imagine it in your head as an uptempo, you can hear what might have been) This is a particularly fine arrangement, and if you follow the tempo instructions, you’ll find it’s quite flexible and expressive.
In the opening section, the guitar has rhythmic notation and chord symbols that match what you have in your score, but not ringing for the full length of the chord the way you might expect. It might be worth a clarifying conversation to arrive at exactly what you’d like.
No. 8 Incidental: Rehearsal- Slap That Bass
If your pianist really wants to learn the stride, by all means, go to town. But you could easily simplify the left hand to a single note on beats 1 and 3, and then the lower part of the chord on 2 and 4. Fill out the right hand with some notes from the chord within the melody octave and the number is much less scary.
This cue is played twice, keep an eye on that.
No. 9 Slap That Bass
A second song from 1937’s Shall We Dance? The original filmed version is very sloppy at the outset, with very poorly mimed instruments, vocals out of tempo with the accompaniment, and a static staging that opens out into one of Astaire’s most impressive tap scenes. For some reason the visual is staged around a factory, with the giant factory mechanisms adding to the rhythm of the tune. Strohman’s take much more clearly grounds the song’s setup in the dance, especially as we see the ladies becoming basses that the men play.
This single chart is orchestrated by Broadway legend Sid Ramin, in his second to last Broadway assignment. See the video above for more details.
But a lot of the credit for the effectiveness of this number has to go to the beautiful working collaboration between Susan Stroman and dance arranger Peter Howard. There are a lot of places where the music has clearly been tailored to tie together threads from previous storytelling and move the narrative forward through dance. At measure 100, the boys chant the dance steps they fumbled in the previous scene, leading to a pantomime of Bobby/Zangler cutting lengths of rope, setting up the delightful visual of the follies girls becoming upright basses, which are then played by the boys in measure 148. At 202, the music shifts to Polly’s perspective, to her Someone to Watch over Me melody, the music tells us she’s falling in love with him. It’s a knock-out tap number the audience loves, but it’s all storytelling. Astaire’s versions of these tunes are tap extravaganzas, not storytelling moments.
If you’ve managed to find a cast member who plays, you can have them actually play this bass part live. If not, you’ll need to work out a way to line up the pit bass and the mimed stage bass in the scene before. I wound up cueing both players’ notes at the same time, but if your bass player can actually see the action on stage, you might cut out the middleman and have them watch each other. Miming the bass is really about selling the slap, but not actually making the sound; the pluck is an exaggerated right hand movement away from the bass, which will read as a pizz snap back to the fingerboard without actually making the sound.
At measure 94, I finally gave in and just conducted each of the notes for the orchestra, conducting the new tempo against the syncopated figure just wasn’t locking in.
There is an error in the vocal score in measure 242; the last 2 chords in the right hand need D sharps and F sharps; this is a B7 chord.
No. 10 Embraceable You
This is the fourth number from Girl Crazy that made it into Crazy for You, and the first one that’s a genuine classic, appearing basically in its original form, changing only the ‘Papa’s that read as creepy today.
This is another spot where the guitar book has open changes which may be slightly different from what you’ve come to expect in the piano vocal. In measure 5, have the player mark D6/F# on beat 1, and in measure 11, change the D6 to a Bm1. Add an A pedal in measure 12 and 13.
Conduct the first section in 2 as written, then switch to 4 at 20, and back to 2 in measure 24. Go to 4 in measure 48, then back to 2 in 54. Go into 4 at 86, and stay in 4 to the end.
The violin obligato is cued in Reed 1, but it’s obviously much more idiomatic to the violin.
There is a clef error in the cello in the last 2 measures. Compare the vocal score and you’ll see the issue.
No. 11 Tonight’s the Night
Tonight’s the Night was cut from 1929’s Show Girl; it’s another throwaway number, used as vaudeville style underscore for scenes that advance the storytelling. The piano score was found in the Warner Brothers music warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey in 1982, otherwise it would have been lost to the sands of time. The top of the number covers a scene change. It’s basically designed to function as an ‘in 1’, in front of the main curtain, but your production’s choices may necessitate a repeat somewhere.
These sorts of scenelets should bounce back and forth and time out very similarly every time. Unfortunately, the vamp from 55 to 86 is really long, and jumping to 87 is not all that easy. I suggest you make a decision to do that whole section a fixed number of times (2-3 most likely) and then live in the vamp at 87-90 until the next section comes due. It’s safer, and repetition of the old school 87-90 vamp is actually pretty funny under the Lank-Irene scene. 102 is tricky to get out of, because it’s so short and there’s a crowd reaction that has to land before you go on. You don’t have time for a ‘last time’ signal. Just indicate that you’ll be cuing a really strong ‘out’ to get out of the vamp.
What your production SHOULD have done is set up the next scene behind the curtain while Tonight’s the night is running. If they did, this works perfectly. If they didn’t do that, and they’re setting up the next scene on stage, measures 119 and 120 are going to get real old real fast. In that case, bounce back to measure 55 and scene change from there.
No. 12 I Got Rhythm
This is the fifth number from Girl Crazy to appear in Crazy for You, and one of Gershwin’s most important contributions to American popular music. There is some controversy about whether the tune is original to Gershwin, or whether he heard it played, perhaps by William Grant Still, one of the great Black musicians and composers of that era. Questions about the genesis of quite a lot of Gershwin’s music have been put forward, and certainly his work relies very heavily on ideas originated in the Black community. Gershwin made no secret of his enthusiasm for Black music and his debt to the people that originated it. The fact that Gershwin’s music capitalized on those ideas and found popularity and monetary success among the larger White audience while Black composers found less success causes many modern audiences understandable discomfort, and I’m not going to argue with them. I offer my own opinion here, which you can take or leave. The history of race and commerce in America has many competing and sometimes upsetting narratives I can’t hope to untangle within the confines of a single blog post, even if I felt competent to do so.
The melody of I Got Rhythm is built mostly on a simple pentatonic scale, which is the basis of a great deal of Black music in America, as well as folk music from all over the world. The song is syncopated in a way that’s common to post-ragtime composers both Black and White. The extension of Ragtime’s 123 123 12 rhythmic pattern to a 123 123 123 123 12 12 pattern is one of the stylistic hallmarks of the late 20s and early 30s. It seems to me that the rhythmic activation of a simple up-and-down pentatonic pattern of the A section of the tune is in a way so basic to the building blocks of this era of music that it would be hard to establish a distinctive authorship for Gershwin or anybody else.
What makes I Got Rhythm unique is its harmonic structure, also straightforward and simple, but so elegantly organized that it operates as a little machine. The B section, a chain of Dominant chords that sequence back to the tonic feels inevitable, and yet is interesting enough to be able to support what seems like an infinite number of variations.
Gershwin himself discovered this quickly. He went on stage with the Girl Crazy cast every so often to add some piano flourishes, and 3 years after the song was introduced, Gershwin wrote a set of variations for piano and orchestra. It must have been something like this on stage, since this film was made just 2 months after the show closed:
Other musicians also began to cover the song almost immediately. There were at least 6 recordings in 1930 alone. In the Bebop era, jazz musicians began to write new melodies over existing chord changes. This practice served multiple functions. Writing a new tune ensured players wouldn’t need to pay copyright royalties to the publisher. It allowed players to call a tune in a combo setting that other players would already know how to solo over. It provided players a framework that would bring order to a consciously angular and counterintuitive musical style, elevating the tune itself to the level of melodic complexity once reserved for the solos, and raising the bar for the solos that followed. We call these new tunes Contrafacts. By 1950 there were more than 75 recorded bebop tunes that used the chord changes to I Got Rhythm as their foundation. I Got Rhythm has become such an important part of the framework of modern Jazz that the chord changes are known as “Rhythm Changes”. The Rhythm Changes sit alongside the 12 bar blues and the Coltrane Changes as foundational texts for Jazz improvisation. If Gershwin had never written another song popular with the Jazz community, this one tune would have placed him in the level of the most influential musicians in the history of Jazz, even though he was technically not a Jazz musician.
Gershwin’s Jewishness put him in a marginalized societal position that must always be remembered in any discussion of his work, and his lack of pedigreed classical training denied him the respect given to a composer of traditional symphonic music. His positioning in his world as an outsider made his cultural importance possible, because whatever he did had to be done from the periphery. This peripheral perspective gave him the artistic license he used to borrow liberally from cultural sources and mix them in an unorthodox way.
Were Gershwin a Black musician, his road would have been much more difficult. It would be inaccurate and disrespectful to say that Gershwin invented this kind of music or that all his ideas were without precedent. But it’s also important to give him credit for creating this particular iteration of the cultural idea. Along with Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess, I Got Rhythm stands as one of the most culturally significant landmarks of musical modernism, largely because of the clarity and utility of Gershwin’s execution.
You can hear the development of the possibilities of this tune and the expanding rhetorical devices of Jazz instrumentation and big band vocabulary by simply comparing the original 1930 orchestration in Merman’s 1937 broadcast and the Judy Garland version in the 1943 Film (see my first video above) The original version almost doesn’t know what it has, it doesn’t explore the full potential of the tune, and Merman’s famous held C seems very tame by today’s standards.
Garland’s band accompaniment, led by Tommy Dorsey, is a riot of instruments playing as families with very sophisticated harmony. In the intervening years between these arrangements, there’s been a kind of arms race for beauty, creativity and virtuosity between Ellington, Basie, Goodman, and others.
Crazy for You’s orchestration adds to that felicity the further vocabulary of decades of Broadway reimaginings of that sonic world. There are woodwind doublings, onstage percussive sounds, novelty passages of ragtime, and imitation of dance moves in the orchestra that wring endless possibilities out of the small ensemble. This orchestration supports the choreography in a way you are not likely to find even in many a Hollywood film, and released from the high-art aspirations of contemporary jazz arrangement, these orchestrations are also free to be silly or whimsical, or to drop out entirely as the story demands. Yes, the audience loves a tap-dance extravaganza, but they really love it because of how strongly it tells the story; these people have fallen in love with the theatre even if the audience doesn’t come. I might even go so far as to say that this number is the best narrative use of tap in musical theatre history.
There’s a chapter in Broadway Stories: A Backstage Journey Through Musical Theatre by Marty Bell that provides a fly-on-the-wall look at the creation of this number, and it’s a must read if you can get your hands on it.
No. 12-I Dance- Part One: I Got Rhythm
The top of this mammoth dance break is a stage percussion part. It’s true that the onstage percussion parts are cues in the orchestra, but they don’t really layer. So when Perc 2 does the saw part at 5, they stop doing the hammers, and when the sandpaper part comes in in Perc 1, it stops playing the shovel part. You can correct this in the parts or even re-assign the parts to other pit players, but ideally the stage parts actually provide the sounds. Since these are props questions, you might insert yourself into the discussion of the things that make those sounds.
Give the hammer and shovel parts to musicians if possible, they ground the whole thing, and if they speed up or slow down, you’re cooked.
The piano part at 29 can be simplified a little if necessary. The important thing is that it keep the tempo up!
Measure 59 is not really a grand pause.
The passage at 119 is from a Gershwin solo piano arrangement from 1932 (see video above)
Reading measure 127 it seems like the Eight notes should be pretty important, but in performance that line is not really audible, and the melody is what really counts.
The trad jazz passage at 167 is really fun, and if your players know how, they can decorate it a bit!
The tire pump/musical saw section is tricky to pull off. You will have a tough time getting that onstage musical saw to really work. You can cut from 207 to 226 if you don’t want the hassle.
The Csardas passage at 238 is the only real musical reference to the Zangler character being European at all. It’s one of Peter Howard’s many delightful touches.
No. 12-II Dance- Part Two: I Got Rhythm
The tappers establish the tempo here, and they’re liable to get excited. You need to correct wherever they land when the band comes back in.
Measure 89 is a delightful musicalization of a fantastically whimsical choreography idea, and one of the silliest piano reductions I’ve ever seen. See my tiktok about it.
At the very end of the number, you can carefully assign notes in the chord or you can let everyone sing whatever note in the chord they like, making sure only 1 or 2 high voices sing the high B flat.
Entr’acte: The Real American Folk Song
Act 2 opens with the first Gershwin song to appear on Broadway, in 1918’s Ladies First. But first we have a number of passages from previous dance breaks. The transition from the Entr’acte proper to the number is another Gershwin first, Rialto Ripples, from 1917, his first published piece. It’s a lovely touch, and I think a favorite of Peter Howard; you can hear him play it in his cabaret act on his CD.
You want to start Rialto Ripples in the same tempo as Real American Folk Song, which is tricky to think when you’re coming out of the previous tempo. I had a really wonderful pit pianist, and I just told him to think that tempo and lock it in.
For some reason the parts and the cast recordings don’t agree with the piano lick in the Piano Vocal score at 74a and 75a. But it’s easy enough to fix.
Vocal parts in the trio are again in the barbershop layout, with the melody stems pointing down. If they can possibly do it up the octave at 93a, they should. The audience loves it.
No. 13 continued Incidental: American Rag
This is way to virtuosic a piano part to be an underscore. Either simplify it or track it and have sound play the recording.
No. 14 What Causes That?
The second song from 1928’s Treasure Girl to make it into the show (the other being the title song) Michael Feinstein suggested the song to Ken Ludwig, having recorded it on his Pure Gershwin album in 1987. Early in previews, it was in late in Act I, but it works very well where it is here, coming on the heels of a scene imitating an iconic Marx Brothers mirror routine.
Some folks are sensitive to jokes about suicide; you might bring that up on the front end to gauge if this is going to be an issue in your production. I don’t have a solution, but I believe in raising potential snags early.
Be in 2, not 4.
117 is probably NOT a grand pause as indicated in the score.
No. 14a Scene Change: Bobby Wakes Up
Cute little Grieg joke. Wonder who came up with it!
No. 15 Naughty Baby
This number is from 1924’s Primrose. A concert reconstruction of Primrose conducted by John McGlinn in 1987 at the Library of Congress drew public attention to this song. In his review for the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote:
The plot of ”Primrose,” which involves three pairs of lovers, is romantic fluff in the post-Gilbert-and-Sullivan mode. Its performance on Friday, however, yielded the evening’s single most exciting discovery in ”Naughty Baby.” an obscure Gershwin tune that has the earmarks of an overlooked masterpiece. ”Naughty Baby” finds Gershwin at his most insouciantly jazzy and boasts a lilting, sharply syncopated melody that strongly echoes ”Somebody Loves Me” (also written in 1924). On the basis of one vocal and two instrumental reprises, one is tempted to rank it on a par with ” ‘S Wonderful.”
Maureen McGovern subsequently titled an album after it 2 years later, and that’s where Ludwig first heard it. The inclusion of the song here places it firmly in the Gershwin catalog. The title is also a phrase in Embraceable You, which makes it a natural fit for this score.
Someone ought to use the first 6 measures to demonstrate how impractical correct spelling can be. The E double flat chords should be D chords, the F flat chords should be Es
In measure 3, trumpet 1 has a misprint, it should be a concert G#, not a concert G.
Measure 5 should be in 4, not in 2.
If you need a scene change, (and I think you probably will) go back to measure 52.
No. 15a Incidental: Crazy For You
This is the second celesta scene change, but this time it connects back to Bobby, who now has experience and memories in this theatre too.
No. 17 Stiff Upper Lip
This is the third song from A Damsel in Distress, and the only one not sung originally by Fred Astaire. It was sung by the inimitable Gracie Allen and followed by a funhouse sequence that doesn’t advance any story, but is nevertheless extremely impressive.
The temple block part at 145 can throw things a little off kilter. You might put something else on the first beat of the measure, like a light kick or a rimshot to see if that helps. Otherwise it can feel a little like the player is just behind the beat.
This number isn’t as kaleidoscopic as the other dance numbers in the show; you sort of have to establish a brisk tempo and drive it all the way to the end. The audience will thank you.
No. 18 They Can’t Take That Away From Me
This is the third and final selection from Shall We Dance, yet another Astaire classic. He sings it to Ginger Rogers on the deck of a boat. We don’t think of Astaire as a singer really, but the song plays to his strength, and for once the lyric seems to be doing real dramatic work. In 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway they would do a beautiful dance routine to it.
This is one of the places where an underpowered string section will feel inadequate. The divisi in the first 3 measures can be re-organized, but it’s a little tricky. The bass voice is wrong in measure 3 in the piano vocal, the last chord should have a d under that 4th. It’s also an exceedingly unusual chord to drop you off, your Bobby may have trouble hearing the E flat that starts us off.
The arrangement is in many respects like an old Nelson Riddle Sinatra arrangement, with laid-back winds over a placid rhythm section. Particularly in the piano offbeats in 39 and 41, we feel the ring-a-ding sound. Don’t play the left hand figure in 33 and 34 when you’re accompanying in rehearsal; it conveys an impression the actual band parts don’t.
No. 19 But Not For Me
This is the sixth and final number from Girl Crazy to make it into the show, and the only one from Act II. The verse and the second chorus are not used.
It also has the feeling of a classic Nelson Riddle arrangement.
Measure 33 should really switch to a slow 2. Back into 4 in measure 59.
No. 19 cont. Reprise: But Not For Me
The piano vocal is in a really unfortunate key, but the band parts are not. I joked about the piece being in C flat major for a week to the confused looks of the band before I found out that they were mostly in B major. I found this a surprisingly affecting reprise, and I think it’s because of how beautifully it’s orchestrated.
No. 19a Scene Change: New Promenade
The Concerto in F is a lovely touch, and my horn players had a lot of fun making the old car-horn sounds. One of my players pulled the tuning slide and put a solo cup over the end to create a great Model T sound.
There is an error in the Bari Sax in measure 28. The third beat should be a D, not an E
No. 20 Nice Work if You Can Get It
This is the fourth song from A Damsel in Distress, another Astaire signature piece. When the song is sung in that film, it has a very similar tight harmony part for the women that appears in Crazy for You, and it’s also an example of the descending chromatic harmony under a singable tune that I reference in the 2nd video above.
When Astaire dances the routine in the film, it’s yet another example of his consummate artistry. That routine is built around Astaire drumming and playing the drums mostly with his feet while dancing. It’s almost as audacious as his roller-skating routine to Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off in Shall We Dance. It’s remarkable that these musical numbers built around very specific dancing stunts manage to also become classic song standards we love well outside their original contexts.
To practical matters: I think 140 to the quarter is way too fast. The Original Broadway tempo is 120, and we took it at 110.
The three part harmony in measure 20 is really quite tricky, particularly for the lowest part. This may be a situation for some folks to sing offstage.
The passage at 204 is almost verbatim the same as a break in Shall We Dance, but this one may be a little quicker. The passage at 91 was difficult for us to coordinate. The quarter stays the same, you should run it a few times under tempo clapping the quarter. If your drummer knows what’s up you should be in good shape.
No. 21 French Reprise: Bidin’ My Time
There isn’t much time to change the set here; I wound up writing a little connecting section. I made a TikTok about it. Sorry, I won’t send you my arrangement.
Measure 39 is quite odd. The vocal parts make sense, but the C natural contradicts the A major tonality.
No. 22 Reprise: Things Are Looking Up
I took this in 2, going into 4 at measure 9 to facilitate a little ritardando.
No. 23 Finale
This whole number should move at a pretty fast clip for the most part, with the obvious exception of 22-29.
Measures 26 through 29 are an allusion to Tschaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, and they’re not easy for your first violin soloist. Consider budgeting some time in rehearsal for that; it’s quite high, very exposed, and easy to play out of tune.
Measure 29-A is a puzzlement; a single bar in a new meter and tempo that immediately changes. I recommend you think of the measure as downbeat-upbeat, each beat functioning as a bar of the new tempo at measure 30 in one. It will take a little getting used to, but the winds need the downbeat to line up their chromatic scale, and the two beats help get the new tempo in time.
That page could very well give you some grief, but likely not as much as the choral parts beginning in measure 74. The top voices begin in a tritone against each other, which they continue for 12 bars, moving up a half step every so often. 86-101 are not terribly difficult, but 101A-101X are not easy to hear, particularly measures 101 W and 101 X, where every note is both a tritone and a second from everyone else. Definitely learn this an octave down, the hearing of it is a different matter than the singing of it up that high. You may find you need to simplify this passage.
Cut a half note out of 101 so your players can catch a breath.
No. 24 Curtain Calls
There isn’t much here that you haven’t already done. Measure 160 should have an E natural in the vocal, not an E flat.
No. 25 Exit Music
This is also music we have played before, and you can skip this at the sitzprobe.
The Orchestra
This is as good a place as any to point out that one of the reed books that will arrive in the mail has the incorrect show listed on the cover. I think it’s Sweet Charity. Don’t panic. It’s all the correct music.
Even though the piano book is quite difficult at times, this is not a piano-bass-drumset kind of show. This is a big band show, and the piano acts as a rhythm instrument with occasional prominent obligato. As much of the band as you can get, you should. I was able to hire 20 players, the largest ensemble I’ve ever had at this venue. When the overture began, audience members were overwhelmed by the richness of the sound. It’s an extremely well put together show, and if you hire the right players, it feels like the very best of Broadway. I was lucky, though. Most people don’t have that luxury.
Don’t do the show unless you can afford these 8 people:
Piano (and hire a really good one)
Bass (you can’t do slap that bass without a bass)
Percussion 1 (you can’t do a tap show without a drummer)
Reeds 1-3 (the important violin 1 parts are cued into these books)
Trumpet 1 (the trumpet book has both 1 and 2 in it. Your player will toggle)
Trombone 1 (there are some important lyric parts in here)
If you do this, you’ll need to work hard to replace everyone you didn’t hire, and all your players will be busy the whole show. It will be exhausting. I know because I music directed this years ago with that smaller size pit. Without all the brass parts, tell Trumpet 1 to use their discretion as far as the upper octave goes. The screaming high brass will sound dreadful if there isn’t any support underneath it.
If you can afford 9 players, add Horn 1
If you can afford 10 players, add Reed 4
If you can afford 11 players, add Trumpet 2
If you can afford 12 players, add Trombone 2 (the tuba part in this book is neat)
If you can afford 13 players, add Horn 2
If you can afford 14 players, add Violin 1
If you can afford 15 players, add Cello (there are some exquisite countermelodies here)
If you can afford 16 players, add the String reduction book
If you can afford 17 players, add Reed 5
If you can afford 18 players, add Guitar (doubling Banjo)
If you can afford 19 players, add Violins 2 and 3 and don’t hire the string reduction book
If you can afford 20 players, add Percussion 2
If you can afford 21-24 players, add Violins 4-6 and Cello 2
The string books work like this:
There are a couple of very prominent places where a string section is necessary. You will wish you had 6 violins and 2 cellos, and you will need to rewrite the parts if you don’t have the coverage. I’ve laid those places out above; these places are so few that they almost don’t justify the players. There are a handful of VERY important first violin lines that are cued in the other books, and some delightful cello parts that aren’t critical but are very useful to have.
If you hire one violinist and the keyboard string reduction, you get the best of both worlds at the cheapest cost.
If you hire the cellist and further violinists, you supplement the sound enormously, but you have to get to at least three violins before you can credibly remove the keyboard string reduction entirely. The places where the strings hold everything together can be moved into the keyboard 1 book, as I’ve indicated above. So if you have two or three violins, you can forego the string reduction player and let Keys 1 handle the most important spots.
Be aware that the exposed guitar sections aren’t always written out with the voicings in the piano reduction.(see commentary above)
The percussion part is not strictly necessary, although when you add the xylophone to these tunes, it really enhances the period effect.
At some point, of course, it becomes a space issue. I think I was within a player or two of having my pit too cramped for comfort.
I hope this exploration has been helpful to you as you prepare your production!
Music Directing the School Musical 
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