Broadway hit comes to IU

The IU Auditorium will bring an audience through its limestone edifice at 8 p.m. tonight and Wednesday with Troika Entertainment's national tour of "Crazy for You." \nKen Ludwig, a playwright known for several Broadway farces including "Moon Over Buffalo" and "Lend me a Tenor," took his inspiration for tonight's billing from the 1930 Broadway hit by George and Ira Gershwin called "Girl Crazy." The similarities between the two shows are apparent, but Ludwig's flavor shines in "Crazy for You." \nThe original storyline told of a spoiled New York society brat whose family thought he needed an old fashion dose of the wild west to toughen him up. In Ludwig's version, the lead character, Bobby Child, the son of a wealthy banker, also winds up in Nevada. While there, Child, a wanna-be song-and-dance man that could easily add to Fred Astaire's job security, is supposed to serve a foreclosure notice on a dilapidated theater that now serves as a post office. \nBobby falls in love with the local postmistress named Polly, loses her when his New York fiancée crashes the party and then manages to sort out which of the two he loves the most. \nNew in Ludwig's version of Gershwin's classic is the use of mistaken identity in his plot construction, a device he has used in other shows. In this instance it involves a man named Bella Zangler, a sort of big-name showman loosely based on Florenz Ziegfeld, an impresario who at one time could make or break a career. \nOverall the structure of the show is very similar to its roots in the 1930s. The plot really depends on the whole concept of suspension of disbelief. The music does little or nothing to advance the plot, but it does a whole lot to add to the entertainment value. \nGershwin staples like "Someone to Watch Over Me," "I Got Rhythm," "Embraceable You" and "They Can't Take that Away from Me" fill Ludwig's two-act play. Much of the orchestra's playlist comes from a variety of places and not just leftovers from "Girl Crazy."\nHarvey G. Cocks has spent the last 60 years working in theater, 30 of which have been on Broadway. He directed "Crazy for You" last summer. \nCocks said that in their time, the music of the Gershwin brothers was a piece of Americana that could speak to New Yorkers, which was important because, in that era, the theater industry was locally supported, not tourist-based as it is now.\n"Much of the music in the show is taken from a hodge-podge of places. One was an old truck filled with sheet music that was recently uncovered. Another place is score written for a movie called "Damsels in Distress,"that was the only film Fred Astaire made without Ginger Rogers," Cocks said. "I think there's better music out there that could have been chosen from, but they're all numbers you can identify with the Gershwin's."\n-- Contact staff writer Brandon Morley at bmorley@indiana.edu.