Ruth Leon Pocket Theatre Review

Crazy For You – Gillian Lynne Theatre

Broadway director/choreographer Susan Stroman has gifted London with her ebullient production of the Gershwin musical, Crazy For You. All fuss and pink feathers and spangles, this can’t be mistaken for anything else – it’s a feelgood show with tapping feet, some gentle jokes and, above all, a world-class score. Here are all the great songs from the Gershwin catalogue, all sung and danced very nicely by a large cast of British performers.

The standout is Charlie Stemp, a young British dancer who is a truly remarkable ‘find’. He first caught my eye in a small part in Wicked in the West End and I remember writing at the time that there was a ‘boy’ in the cast who was ready for the big time and I hoped someone would give him the chance to shine as he surely would.

The ‘someone’ was super producer Cameron Mackintosh and the show was the revival of the cockney musical Half a Sixpence in which young Charlie’s tapshoes shone, as I had predicted. He went on to make his Broadway debut in Hello Dolly! where he was inevitably overshadowed by that show’s star, Bette Middler, but it was clear that when he was allowed to shine, he could.

It is appropriate that the musical he now carries, as the leading man in Crazy For You, is at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End. Gillian Lynne would have loved Charlie Stemp. The ground-breaking choreographer of Cats and Phantom was often heard to bemoan in private the lack of talented British male dancers. Now, in Charlie Stemp, we’ve got a homegrown dancing star who can triumph in all forms of show dancing, especially tap. He can sing well enough, and he has immense charm, but his real talents are in his feet and he fulfils all the demands of Stroman’s choreography and guides Crazy For You’s featherlight plot to a satisfactory finale.

It’s worth mentioning that Crazy For You isn’t actually a Gershwin musical, it’s a musical constructed from many wonderful Gershwin songs, based loosely, very loosely, on Girl Crazy, which was a Gershwin musical with an equally silly but slightly different plot and was chiefly remarkable for having made stars of both Ginger Rodgers and Ethel Merman, who led that 1930 cast.