Ken Ludwig's remarkable Chichester Festival Theatre double comes to a close

It's been a remarkable Chichester Festival Theatre summer for Ken Ludwig.

By Phil Hewitt for Sussex World

His adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express on the main-house stage was swiftly followed by Crazy For You, starring Charlie Stemp, for which he wrote the book, with music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin.

The show, which completes its run on September 4, was being planned in the States back in 2019 and then of course the pandemic came, a delay which has meant that this year’s revival has become a 30th- anniversary celebration.

The musical, after a Washington DC try-out and ten previews, opened at Broadway’s Shubert Theatre on February 19 1992 and ran for 1,622 performances – coming on the back of Ken Ludwig's first Broadway show Lend Me a Tenor (1989) which won three Tony Awards and was nominated for nine.

“There was a man called Roger Horchow (1928-2020, an American retailer and Broadway producer) who had not produced any theatre before but was in love with the Gershwins’ music. He had acquired the rights to produce a musical using the music of George and Ira, the songs that they wrote together, not the songs that they did separately with other people so that was 400 songs. And so I had a call out of the blue from Roger. He said’ I've got the rights and I want to do this musical.’ He said ‘I have seen Lend Me A Tenor, I loved it and I want you to write the book.

“I went back to an old Gershwin musical called Girl Crazy. I read that and I said we can't do that it's terrible. It was vaudeville sketches. It was sketch after sketch but it did have some great hits in it and I said I wanted to use some of those songs but I said I would also look at the other songs that they wrote and try to see if we could come up with what they now call a jukebox musical. Crazy For You may actually have been the first of the jukebox musicals, a musical that was taking songs already written by a team and putting them together, just as they did with Mamma Mia. I did it and he put money into it and we rehearsed in New York and we found an unknown choreographer called Susan Stroman (who now directs and choreographs the CFT revival).

“We put it together. We had the best designers. Roger really supported it all in the ways that you need to do. We had the crème de la crème of the crop. We rehearsed for six weeks in New York and then did an out-of-town try-out in Washington.”

Ken then had to rewrite some of it “like crazy”: “We just worked and worked on it We got to New York and did the previews and it took off.”

In some ways the show has a story which reflects Ken’s own experiences: “I wanted to be in the theatre but my parents said if you don't go to graduate school you won't make a living.

“I got to Harvard Law School and I also spent two years in Cambridge and I actually started to practise as a lawyer. That was my day job. But I woke up every morning and wrote from 4 to 8.30 every day for maybe four or five years. You have to pay your dues. I wrote very early in the morning, put on a suit and got to the office at nine. I wrote four plays before I did Lend Me A Tenor and that was what changed things.”