Crazy for You: Notes from a Dramaturg (Part 4)

Earlier this month, MSU's Department of Theatre and Dance and the John J. Cali School of Music performed Crazy for You, the Tony Award-winning adaptation of the Gershwin musical comedy Girl Crazy. To wrap up her month on the Creative Edge, production dramaturg and MSU musical theatre student Kelly Lynn Karcher shares excerpts from an exclusive interview with Angelique Ilo, dance captain on the original Broadway production of Crazy for You.

To read the complete interview, as well as more about Girl Crazy and Crazy for You, click on the PDF link below to access Kelly's complete Crazy for You study guide.

Interview with Angelique Ilo
Kelly Karcher: What other shows have you worked on, on Broadway, etc., both before Crazy for You and since?

Angelique Ilo: I started my career in the first Chorus Line. I was hired in 1979 and auditioned for a show that had already been running for four years; so with the record of shows running on Broadway—and they don’t run very long—I thought, why should I audition when the show is gonna close, and meanwhile it ran for another 11 years! So, I was in the first Chorus Line off and on for 11 years...and then when that closed, I thought I was really all done. And then I auditioned for [choreographer] Susan Stroman in 1992 for Crazy for You and got that, and then I became the dance captain... I was really left to manage [the show] along with the stage manager, which taught me the show inside-out upside-down....

KK: What were your specific duties, in the rehearsal stages and once performances had begun?

AI: A dance captain’s responsibility, especially at that point, is to preserve what the choreographer and the director have initially established. Once the show opens and they freeze the show, that’s what it should be, barring accidents, or barring somebody having an injury and they have to make a compensation. [An injured] actor must come to you and say, I have a really bad right hamstring and I don’t think I can do that cartwheel to the right, can I do it to the left? And then we would say, OK, let’s see if this works for your partner, and we’d have a rehearsal at whatever the stage manager says is a good time to get onstage...[and] we’d work it out... That’s what a dance captain would do, a dance captain would make sure that the show remains in its original state....

KK: What was different about Crazy for You as compared to others shows you had previously worked on?

AI: All shows have their different challenges. I think, for Crazy for You, it looks very straightforward and simple, but it’s very sophisticated, and the nuances of the show, the attention to detail of it—otherwise it would just look like a bunch of dancing boys and a bunch of dancing girls. I think what makes it different...is that they took a very simple story and they made it live and breathe...the whole company had full depth to their characters and that helped with the storytelling....

KK: What was different about the style of the dancing, the acting, and the piece in general, from other shows? It’s a very different style than Chorus Line and a lot of other shows that were coming out at that time.

AI: I have to respect Stroman so much because she does her homework, and she has an adoration for that period of the ‘30s, and she loves Fred [Astaire] and Adele [Astaire] and Ginger [Rogers]...that whole era, I would say... [I]n the ’30s they had very specific styles, and the choreography has a mixture of all those styles... “Slap That Bass” has...some jitterbug moves... “Shall We Dance” is completely a Fred and Ginger number... And the tap dancing, the style of tap dancing too, it’s Stroman’s style, but she put in little pieces that would give it a time signature....

KK: So, what comes first, the choreography or the orchestrations?

AI: Stroman would know what the music is, the basic melody, and she would choreograph in all different styles, and the dance arranger would try to fit it... She would use all different dance styles on the same melody, that’s what she’s known for. “I Got Rhythm” is a great example—you take the standard feel of, say, a horse trotting and then the dance arranger would try to match that feeling, of what she is trying to execute. And then you have the New Orleans minstrel style, the player piano/early ‘30s/ragtime style, and then of course the end of “I Got Rhythm” is all tap.

KK: What special role do you feel the dancing plays in Crazy for You?

AI: It tells the story. It propels the storyline forward. Each production number takes us on a journey and has a complete arc, a beginning, middle, and end. “Shall We Dance?” is a perfect example of that. Agnes de Mille in Oklahoma! really changed the way dance was used, and Stroman’s work is about carrying the torch, using the dance to tell a story.
—Kelly Lynn Karcher

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