Girl Crazy, Fanny and Anyone Can Whistle on Tap for Encores!
Girl Crazy, with music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and book by Guy Bolton and Jack McGowan, will open the 2009-2010 season for New York City Center’s 2009-2010 Encores! on November 19. The season will continue with Fanny, the 50th Encores! production at the City Center since 1994, featuring music and lyrics by Harold Rome and book by S. N. Behrman and Joshua Logan, beginning on February 4, 2010. The season will conclude with Anyone Can Whistle, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ 1964 musical, on April 8, 2010.
The Gershwins’ fanciful depression-era musical of 1930, Girl Crazy is about a sophisticated New Yorker marooned in a dusty Western cowtown 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. Opening at the Alvin Theatre on October 14, 1920, the show gave birth to one of the all-time flashiest Broadway scores, featuring “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” “But Not For Me” and “Boy! What Love Has Done To Me,” among others. The original production put a hot-jazz band in the pit, led by cornet virtuoso Red Nichols, and included such jazz greats as Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden. The Encores! production will run November 19 through November 22.
Fanny is based on Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy Marius, Fanny and Cesar. Set in Marseille, it tells of a young girl’s passion for a young man so in love with the sea that he leaves her, little realizing that she is pregnant with his child. Her marriage of convenience to a wealthy older man desperate to have an heir is complicated by the sailor’s return years later. Opened on November 4, 1954 at the Majestic Theater, and starring Florence Henderson, Ezio Pinza and Walter Slezak who won a Tony award for Best Actor in a Musical, Fanny played for a total of 888 performances, with Joshua Logan and S.N. Behrman providing the book, and Harold Rome contributing some of Broadway's most sweeping melodies the title song, “Restless Heart,” “Never Too Late For Love”, as well as a “Be Kind to Your Parents,” a hit single in its day. Fanny runs at City Center February 4–7, 2010.
Anyone Can Whistle is Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ experimental satire of any and every target on the American cultural scene of the moment: conformity, psychology, race relations, greed, religion, politics. Opening at the Majestic Theatre on April 4, 1964, the show divided the critics, baffled the masses and ran for only 12 previews and 9 performances. Its legend grew over the years as Sondheim’s reputation soared, and while the title song and “With So Little to Be Sure Of” emerged as cabaret classics, the rarely heard complete score is a riot of jazzy, show-biz razzmatazz, waltzes, gospel numbers and Broadway pastiche. Anyone Can Whistle runs at the City Center April 8–11, 2010.
New York City Center Encores! has celebrated the rarely heard works of America’s most important composers and lyricists since 1994. Conceived as concert versions, each Encores! season gives three scores the chance to be heard as originally intended by their creators. In past years, Encores! has presented the work of the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Bock and Harnick, Burt Bacharach, Kander and Ebb, Comden and Green, and many others. The program is the recipient of a special 2000 Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre, as well as an Outer Critics Circle Award, Lucille Lortel Award and Jujamcyn Theaters Award.