Above: Ginger Rogers in the original GIRL CRAZY

From Playbill: Encores! will be producing Girl Crazy, the ‘Gershwins’ fanciful Depression-era musical of 1930′, ‘the tale of a sophisticated New Yorker… marooned in a dusty Western cow town with no one who understands him but the Yiddish-speaking cabbie… who brought him there and no one to love but the only woman… within 50 miles’, with the following cast:

• Chris Diamantopoulos as Danny Churchill
• Becki Newton as Molly Gray
• Ana Gasteyer as Kate Fothergill
• Wayne Knight as Gieber Goldfarb
• Marc Kudisch as Slick Fothergill
• Mylinda Hull as Patsy West
• Richard Poe as Jake Howell
• Daniel Stewart Sherman as Lank Sanders
• Gregory Wooddell as Tom Mason

Girl Crazy – with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin and book by Guy Bolton and Jack McGowan – is, of course, is the show that was adapted into Crazy For You,
Ken Ludwig who wrote the book for that production said of Guy Bolton and Jack McGowan’s book:

All those musicals’ books of the ’20s and ’30s were awful, but Girl Crazy seemed to me the awfullest (sic) of all! It was dumb, silly, beyond silly. And full of ethnic humor that wasn’t funny at all. I decided I’d have to rewrite from scratch.

So we’re back to silly gags and ethnic humour then? I don’t know that I’d call that a plus point – although the book, it turns out, is undergoing some reworking, according to Jerry Zaks in an article at BroadwayWorld

The book was partly incoherent and mildly amusing…. David Ives went to work on it with me and my associate, and we spent hours taking a hard look at it and… not changing the story in any way, but resequencing the order of events in a way that made sense, you know? Or more sense.

I’m not sure what the physical result of that is going to be. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Still, it’s a great score and, as it stands, I pretty much prefer Crazy for You all around. Whether or not the Ives/Zaks revisions will change that remains to be seen.