Gershwin Refreshed : ‘Crazy for You’ melds newly found works and classic show tunes into a Tony-winning production that was inspired by old movie musicals

At a 1991 pre-Broadway performance of the Gershwin musical “Crazy for You” in Washington,C., an audience member turned to her companion and said, “I didn’t know George and Ira Gershwin were still alive.”

They’re not: Composer George died of an inoperable brain tumor at age 38 in 1937; his lyricist brother died almost 10 years ago at age 86.

Which is why Mike Ockrent, the British director of “Crazy for You,” delights in recounting the remark he overheard. “That means it felt fresh,” he says over breakfast in Century City near the Shubert Theatre, where the show’s national touring company opens Friday for an 11-week run. “It’s the best comment I ever heard.”

That’s because the production, which won Tony Awards last year for best musical, choreography and costumes, is billed as “the new Gershwin musical comedy”--despite the fact that it is set in the 1930s and is based on material decades old.

Inspired by the 1930 show “Girl Crazy,” which made stars of Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers and employed an orchestra of such relative unknowns as Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, “Crazy for You” tells the story of pampered New York playboy Bobby Child, who is sent by his domineering mother to the mining town of Deadrock, Nev., to foreclose the mortgage on a long-dormant theater.

When Bobby unexpectedly falls in love with the theater owner’s daughter, Polly Brown, he decides to help her stage a show to raise money to revitalize the theater, a mission complicated by mistaken identities and romantic mismatches.

The Broadway Bobby was created by Harry Groener; the part is played here by James Brennan, star of the Broadway and national touring productions of the Ockrent-directed “Me and My Girl.” Karen Ziemba, who garnered critical kudos for her performance locally in the John Kander-Fred Ebb revue “And the World Goes ‘Round” and previously appeared at the Shubert in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” plays Polly; Jodi Benson created the Broadway role. Playing Ziemba’s father is Carleton Carpenter, who once crooned “Abba Dabba Honeymoon” with a teen-age Debbie Reynolds in the MGM musical “Two Weeks.”

It might be said that the “let’s put on a show” aspect of “Crazy for You” reflects contemporary sensibilities off stage as well as on. For the project began with producer Roger Horchow, founder of the upscale mail-order catalogue “The Horchow Collection”; he had fallen in love with George Gershwin’s music as a youngster when he awoke one night to hear the composer playing piano in his living room, a guest of his musician mother.

After selling his catalogue business in 1991, Horchow and his wife decided to try a Broadway go at Gershwin, choosing “Girl Crazy” on the strength of its score. But he and producer Elizabeth Peck Williams deemed the book, which concerned an Eastern playboy who comes west to open a dude ranch, too flimsy.

Accordingly, Williams, who previously produced Broadway’s “The Secret Garden” and “Into the Woods” and co-produced “Love Letters” in Los Angeles, wrote to the Gershwin family and representatives of the original librettists asking permission to rewrite the book. Upon receiving the OK, she and Horchow hired Ken Ludwig, author of the Tony Award-winning comedy “Lend Me a Tenor,” to come up with a new story of the 1930s, retaining the basic elements of East versus West, modern versus traditional and sophisticated versus naive, and told from a 1990s point of view.

The state of that period’s economy in particular strikes a chord with modern audiences, Ockrent believes. “A lot of the great musicals came out of the Depression of the ‘30s,” he says. “We have an understanding of the characters’ fears and worries--of unemployment, chaos. You can look back and detect the similarities. People were afraid of being thrown out of their homes.”

The show’s score also underwent a major overhaul. As was typical in musicals of the era, the songs in “Girl Crazy” bore no particular relation to the story, popping up regardless of the preceding action. But with musicals from “Oklahoma!” on demanding seamlessness, the “Crazy” creators and producers set to work fashioning a new score.

They were aided by fortuitous circumstances. Not only had the Gershwin family given them permission to use the brothers’ entire repertoire, but also a gold mine of hundreds of Gershwin songs and musical snippets, discovered in 1982 in the Warner Bros. Music warehouse in Secaucus, N. J., were in the process of being catalogued by archivist Tommy Krasker.

“We were looking for songs to fit the show, for every mood we wanted,” Ockrent recalls. “We’d say to Tommy, for instance, ‘We’d like something for an opening number.’ He’d thumb through and come up with things, and an hour later the faxes would start coming. We went through about 20 songs for each song we picked.”

Ultimately, six songs from “Girl Crazy” were retained, among them the classics “Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm” and “But Not for Me.” From the Secaucus warehouse came “Tonight’s the Night,” “Naughty Baby,” “What Causes That?” and the title song, “K-ra-zy For You,” from the 1928 show “Treasure Girl.”

Fittingly for a show whose quick, fluid pace was, Ockrent says, inspired by old movie musicals, three numbers were first performed in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film “Shall We Dance?” including the song of the same name and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” A quartet of others, among them “I Can’t Be Bothered Now” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It” were written for Astaire’s “A Damsel in Distress.” And from the show “Oh, Kay” came “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

Some familiar songs are used here in decidedly unfamiliar fashion. “We don’t treat ‘Embraceable You,’ as a hallowed ballad,” Ockrent says. “It’s a comic song for us.”

The show itself has undergone some transformations since opening on Broadway, Ockrent adds. The touring Shubert production is tighter and funnier, and the stars’ dance numbers more intricate, reflecting Brennan and Ziemba’s greater dance strengths.

The Tony Award-winning choreographic duties fell to Susan Stroman, who visited Nevada mining towns as part of her research for the project. The former Broadway gypsy, whose credits as choreographer include “And the World Goes ‘Round” and “Liza Minnelli--Stepping Out,” devised 19 numbers. They range from a romantic waltz for two to razzle-dazzle production numbers, including one in which tapping New York chorus girls spill out of a limo, and another where Nevada miners use pick axes, mining pans, shovels and buckets to demonstrate that “I’ve Got Rhythm.”

“Each Gershwin melody is so wonderful, it really opens itself up to dance,” Stroman says, now riding with Ockrent on their way to a Hollywood church to audition future principal performers. “I was able to take the same tune and put it in different rhythms, depending on the story I wanted to tell. Just hearing my options. . . . I’d ask dance music arranger Peter Howard, ‘What would this sound like as a tango or a Mexican hat dance?’ I ended up using more country fiddle rhythms, though, because it was about miners.”

Given the production team’s quest to contemporize a traditional musical, the very raison d’etre for “Crazy for You” is itself timeless. As Ockrent says, “So many of the songs have resonance, not only for the older generation, but for younger people who know them secondhand. They touch so many people in so many ways.

“The Gershwins haven’t achieved immortality by chance. Their music is as fresh today as 50 years ago.”

“Crazy for You” opens June 4 at 7 p.m., after previews June 2 at 2 and 8 p.m. and June 3 at 8 p.m., at the Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Regular performance schedule: Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Special performances June 30 and Aug . 18 at 2 p.m. No evening performances July 4 and Aug . 22. Show closes Aug . 22. Preview prices $25-$55, regular prices $30-$60. Tickets available at the box office and by calling Tele-charge: (800) 233-3123.