Crazy for You, the “new Gershwin musical comedy” at the Shubert, is a reshaped and augmented granddaughter of Girl Crazy, a 1930 backstage musical with music by George and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Girl Crazy is perhaps best remembered for introducing Ethel Merman, singing “I Got Rhythm.” It was filmed twice, once in 1932 and again in 1943, the latter with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on a show to save a small school in the Southwest and Judy singing “Bidin’ My Time,” “Embraceable You,” “But Not for Me,” as well as “I Got Rhythm,” and Busby Berkeley staging some kaleidoscopic numbers. There is thus much history—and much show-biz static—in the background of Crazy for You, and there was reason, in the abstract, to fear that it might turn out yet another exercise in condescending period camp on the order of No, No, Nanette or 42nd Street. That would, however, have been to reckon without the artists who have brought fresh eyes and ears to the material.

First, some thirteen Gershwin tunes have been added, including “Someone to Watch over Me,” “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Ken Ludwig’s book adheres to the backstage formulae in which a budding young Broadway entrepreneur is exiled to a frontier watering hole, Dead Rock, to foreclose a mortgage on the town theater. There he meets a local girl, whom he deceives by pretending to be mogul Bela