Last night L convinced me to go see Crazy for You at the Zilker Hillside Theater. We assembled a patchwork picnic (sandwiches, salad, fried chicken and sushi), found ourselves a spot about halfway up the hillside with decent sight lines, and settled in.
I wish I could say that I liked the show without reservation. The score is packed full of Gershwin songs, more than a third of which were ones I’ve known since childhood from the Gershwin Songbook. The dancing was mostly very good, although a little more attention to unison in body and arm motion would have been nice. The acting was also good; in some cases it was quite fine. Everyone could sing on key and in time”that is, when I could hear them (more of that later).
I particularly enjoyed Kirk Addison’s performance as Bobby Child. He knows how to wear clothing from the early 1930s and make them look right, and his Hungarian accent as the false Bela Zangler was entertaining without being hokey and overdone. I could wish the same for Espy Biehle, whose role as Patricia Fodor (yes, of the travel-guide Fodors—it’s a long story) suffered from a now-you-see-it British accent that wasn’t seen far too often. Justin Kirchhoff, as her brother Eugene, managed the part of Eccentric English Traveler much better, including the requisite knobby knees installed underneath walking shorts. All that was lacking was a pair of binoculars, and he’d be set for a day of birdwatching.
Marita Stryker carried out the role of Polly Baker (The Girl destined for The Guy) to a nicety, reminiscent of a younger, less brassy Ethel Merman. (Which is a good thing. Merman’s unfortunate habit of belting every song was the thing I liked least about her.) Kelly Bales gave a good performance as Irene, Bobby’s fiancée, although her frequent zingers in the first act needed more superficial sweetening over their scratchcat content to extract the best of the joke. Christina Dahlberg seemed to suffer from a case of physical schizophrenia as Bobby’s mother; her voice was that of a young woman, but her dowager’s hump and cane kept asking to be paired with a cracked old-woman’s croak. She also could have used a bit more dowager-like imperiousness in her scenes with Bobby—and he would have been better for acting more henpecked in the same scenes. Neal Gibson’s role of theater empresario Bela Zangler deserved more time that it received. His drunken in-the-mirror pas de deux with Bobby (“What Causes That?”) was a high point of the second act.
But . . . oh my, the LIBRETTO! It simply wasn’t up to the rest of the show at all. The second act had plot holes big enough to admit the Twentieth Century Limited. Characters flip-flopped emotions with a complete lack of apparent reason or build-up that might have made it believeable. (This was particularly true of the character of Polly Baker.) I found myself thinking that the show would have been greatly improved if the second act were broken in two, and some more character development inserted into the new second and third acts.
And while we’re at it, let’s dump a couple of numbers from the second act and get better ones to replace ’em. “Real American Folk Song (Is a Rag)” doesn’t do much for the show save to fill time, and it failed to get across the idea of continuing celebration. The real “Gerradahere!” number of the whole show, however, is “Stiff Upper Lip,” which appeared to have been beamed in from some other musical. It needs to go back there. Prepare the transporter, Scotty.
The one persistent technical problem throughout the night, as is so often the case with Zilker musicals, was the sound. Several minor characters either were not miked, or didn’t have their microphones turned up in time for us to hear their lines spoken, which left several puzzling holes in the action. Also, one character’s mike suffered from a poor connection, with frequent static and occasional whistles resulting. I kept hoping for someone on technical staff to collar the unfortunate actor (I think it may have been Miss Stryker) and FIX THE DAMNED THING so the entire audience didn’t have to suffer.
Snoopy fights King Kong on the Empire State Building using his flaming ID card. Fnord.
