BWW INTERVIEWS: 'CRAZY' for Jerry Zaks

Jerry Zaks has recreated numerous plays and musicals on and off Broadway, but this weekend, he is making his long-awaited return to City Center’s Encores! series. At the specific invitation of artistic director Jack Viertel, Zaks will direct Encores!’ production of the Gershwins’ classic 1930 musical Girl Crazy for one weekend only.

Zaks was attracted to the project by the score, which features such standards as “Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm” and “But Not for Me.” “The book was partly incoherent and mildly amusing,” Zaks quips. “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.” Adapting the script was a page-by-page process, he continues, and a series of questions. “’Are the events clear in the scenes or not? Is there any way we can make them clearer or more urgent?’ That’s what we do with all the original material, then coming up with a line here or there, if we can improve on what was there.”

His goal in directing the show, he says, is find all of the joy within it. “I want to mine as much joy in this material as possible—comic, melodic, orchestral, choreographic—to give the audience as good a time as possible.” He describes the show as “seriously silly,” then quickly amends, “It’s silly to everyone but the people in it. And I don’t use “silly” as a pejorative; I mean it in the sense of fun and laughter.” The fun, he adds, gets some emotional depth from the love story at the heart of the piece. “Any good musical generally needs some kind of love story,” he says, “and here we’ve got the East meeting the West, and it’s about how they fall in love, and how they deal with each others’ differences. That’s what the piece has always been about, and we’re going to try to make it fresh and available to today’s audiences.”

Directing a show at Encores!, he says, is like playing a game of Beat the Clock. “You have a very short amount
Jerry Zaks of time to do as much good work as you possibly can,” he says. “It’s exhilarating like that. You generally have really good material that you have to do justIce To, and everyone’s under a lot of pressure—the performers, certainly, because of the amount of time they have; the creative team—there’s a lot of pressure to prepare as thoroughly as possible, so that you can hit the ground running when you start rehearsals.”

To keep the show fresh and interesting to a modern audience, Zaks pretends that it was written yesterday and given to him by the authors today. “I have no use in going back to old [versions] of Girl Crazy,” he says, adding that this show will not reference Crazy for You, the 1990 reimagining of the musical. “I don’t have a lot of interest in that; I have a lot more interest in sitting down with Warren Carlyle or David Ives or John Lee Beatty or Rob Fisher—I mean, God, I have a great team!” he exclaims. “William Ivey Long, Peter Kaczorowski—these are great people to be in the room with.”

Together, the creative team looked over the script and figures out what worked then, and what would work now. “Maybe the audience had more tolerance for scenes that went on and on, but we really tried to make the book a lot leaner than it was,” Zaks says. “The process is the same, and everyone more or less pretends they’ve just been given the piece The Day Before, and then we get to work on it. I can’t tell you what it’s like sitting in the orchestra room, listening to the first orchestra read-through of this piece: Here you are in a large room with roughly 30 great musicians, playing music that is unbelievable, and you feel like you’ve been given this great gift, the privilege of sitting there—as Rob Fisher said, ‘Imagine the first time an orchestra read through this score!’” Zaks also praises the original orchestrations of Robert Russell Bennett, calling them “unbelievable.”

Bringing back a classic is never easy, of course, especially when the show is held in such high regard by theater fans. Zaks remembers the challenge of recreating Guys and Dolls in 1992, and the difficulty in getting over peoples’ expectations, and the fear of disappointing them. “As soon as it became public knowledge that I was going to be directing that show, I had any number of people coming up to me—friends, people I’d just met—saying, ‘God, that’s my favorite show!’,” he recalls. “Now, that’s code for ‘Don’t fuck it up.’ That’s what that is.” He quickly acknowledges that the show was not what it needed to be when previews began, but he and choreographer Chris Chadman “did an immense amount of work on changing what we had into what it needed to be.” The show went on to become one of the biggest hits of the season, and ran for well over 1,000 performances.

“Every new show is a challenge,” Zaks says, “and every revival is a challenge in its own way, of trying to make it feel fresh and immediate. But I love that,” he quickly adds. “It rarely makes me nervous or scared or afraid. It makes me excited.”

Photo of Girl Crazy cast by Carol Rosegg