VERO BEACH — As waves of laughter reached the back rows of the Riverside Theatre last week, one member of the audience, Windsor resident Stacey Logan Lewis, felt a pang of wistfulness, remembering her own opening night as Patsy in the original “Crazy for You” on Broadway in 1992.
“It was my first Broadway show and we won all the awards,” she says.
The tap dancing slapstick spectacular, based on the music of George and Ira Gershwin, won three Tony awards: Best Musical, Best Costumes and Best Choreography.
A few rows away at Riverside sat a duo that is essentially a “Crazy for You”-making machine, directing or choreographing at least 30 productions between them.
Deanna Dys, the Riverside production’s choreographer, played the dancer Vera on Broadway alongside Logan’s Patsy.
James Brennan, who is directing at Riverside, starred as Bobby Child on Broadway and on the national tour.
Their personal experience with the original director of “Crazy for You,” the late Michael Ockrent, and the choreographer, Susan Stroman, provided Dys and Brennan with a vision of the show that infused the DNA of Broadway into Riverside’s production.
While not a dead ringer for Broadway’s version of “Crazy for You,” Dys puts the similarities at 75 to 80 percent.
“Sometimes, we made it harder,” she says, laughing. “We changed things according to people’s special talents.”
If Logan and Dys were “giggling together” on opening night, as Dys says they were, sitting in the audience and drinking in the wild enthusiasm, it’s likely because only they knew just how crazy it was putting such a massive show together in only ten days.
For starters, members of this cast were almost all novices to the show – only Jerry Gallagher, at 6 foot 10, had played his role of Moose before, on Broadway and many times since.
The rest absorbed the songs, dances, lines and blocking “like sponges,” Dys says, in some cases learning a scene and never rehearsing it again until the final run-throughs.
“You look at your watch the first day of rehearsal and you don’t stop until opening night,” Dys says.
“I’d have a heart attack,” says Logan.
Dys and Brennan left Vero within a day or two of opening night. Dys spent her last night here at Logan’s Windsor home, playing tennis and walking the beach.
Brennan remains close friends with Logan; they visit whenever he’s directing at Riverside.
“Jimmy was a phenomenal Bobby Child,” says Logan, who saw Brennan in his final dress rehearsal before the show’s first national tour.
It was after that tour, in the late 1990s, that Logan happened to be in Vero with her husband, Robert Lewis, when she got a call from Ockrent at 10:30 at night.
He asked her to play the part of Polly in the production Brennan was directing at Paper Mill Playhouse. That run, a recreation of the Broadway “Crazy for You,” was videotaped by PBS and aired in 1999 as part of the Great Performances series.
Cast as Patsy, she had filled in frequently as the female lead Polly for actress Jodi Benson, best known as the voice of Ariel in “The Little Mermaid.”
Under Ockrent’s direction, Logan says, the cast was encouraged to contribute ideas.
“I certainly created Patsy,” says Logan. “Patsy in the chorus didn’t have any lines. But he let us add stuff. He would say, ‘If you have an idea for a line, I want to hear it.’”
Ockrent insisted the dancers all have names.
“We all had to come up with a back-story so that everybody had a character,” recalls Dys.
She did the same at Riverside with her dancers.
“You want everybody on that stage to have a personality. Are they shy? Are they comfortable around boys? Do they like Deadrock?”
Dys says the scene with the song “Slap That Bass,” which involves unspooling rope and then “stringing” instruments out of women dancers, was taught to the cast in one session.
“We never touched it again until the designer run,” says Dys. “Usually people forget. Not this group.”
Of the two dozen times she has either directed or choreographed “Crazy for You,” Dys says each one is different.
“There have been productions that I recreated every step from Broadway and productions where I’ve recreated not one step. It depends on the people hired and their individuality.”
Dys has been impressed with this, her first time at Riverside.
“It’s been a great pleasure,” Dys says. “They’re doing first-class productions with wonderful New York talent. And they care so much, every department here. They want it perfect.”
