Are there any broadway musicals that pay homage to the 1930s movie musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers?

This guy I watch online was talking about how the Broadway musicals Thoroughly Modern Millie and The Drowsy Chaperone were both homages to the musicals of the 1920s. So I was wondering if they were any broadway musicals which paid homage to the next decade of musicals the 1930s. More specifically the films of dancing duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers who made 10 films together during that time period. The only large scale Astaire-Rogers homage I can think of is the homage/parody High Hat, a sketch on the Carol Burnett Show which you can find on YouTube.

Can you think of any musicals that pay homage to the films of Astaire and Rogers?

I don't know if you want to count this, but when the two male villains in It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman sing "You've Got What I Need Baby" the stage directions mention their doing an Astaire-Rogers movement at one point, and the orchestration on the cast recording support that.

Of course, Ben's "Live! Laugh! Love!" is a clear reference to Astaire's "Top Hat" number.

Susan Stroman's 1992 hit Crazy for You is the closest I can think of. It is based on the 1930 Broadway musical Girl Crazy, whose score was written by George and Ira Gershwin. Although I thought that Astaire was a Broadway star who migrated to Hollywood while Ginger was strictly Hollywood, Rogers played the female lead in Girl Crazy and it made her a star. No, Fred was not in this one. (However Ethel Merman made her Broadway debut here and sang "I Got Rhythm," It made her an "overnight sensation." I can imagine.)

George and Ira wrote the score for one of the Astaire/Rogers films, the 1937 Shall We Dance. Although Crazy for You was primarily kind of based on Girl Crazy, it included three numbers from the film Shall We Dance: "Shall We Dance," "Slap That Bass," and one of Gershwin's best, "They Can't Take That Away From Me." (Gershwin died two months after Shall We Dance was released. "They Can't Take That Away" was posthumously nominated for best song Oscar. It not only didn't win, but lost to "Sweet Lellani" from Waikiki Wedding, proving not only that Hollywood was not sentimental, but also lacked taste.)

So Crazy for You in addition to being generally based on the Gershwin musicals of the 30s, commemorates two dance numbers from an Astaire/Rogers film. After the enormous enthusiasm that greeted the February, 2017 25th anniversary one night concert performance before a star-studded audience at Lincoln Center, it was considered to be on the fast track to Broadway. Susan Stroman workshopped the show in January, 2018 with stars Tony Yazbeck and Laura Osnes (but not with Rachel Bloom, who had appeared in the concert giving it a little more star power), but it never landed anywhere. Not officially dead, but with Stroman out of New York this year on other projects and Yazbeck in a new musical next spring it doesn't look very promising.

Here is the finale and extended curtain call from Crazy for You, 2017.

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https://youtu.be/jqzxDDW4CGQ


Yazbeck and Osnes have done eight shows at 54 Below (four last October and four this May/June) and a lot of what they do is reminiscent of Fred and Ginger. With a little more work at imitating them, they could probably take Astaire and Rogers on the road for a long time.

Here in their finale they sing "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" (which is IN the film but NOT IN Crazy for You), followed by an upbeat dance and tap to Gershwin tunes.

Shot by me at point blank range so could not get head and feet in the same shot. Opted mostly for heads. There are many other videos of them up on YouTube.

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https://youtu.be/n5D2hwCIkIk

Updated On: 8/26/19 at 04:01 AM

I think MY ONE AND ONLY is a better representative of Rogers & Astaire than CRAZY FOR YOU.

GavestonPS said: "I think MY ONE AND ONLY is a better representative of Rogers & Astaire than CRAZY FOR YOU."

Never saw it, except for some highlights. You must have seen more than just the highlight numbers "S'Wonderful" and "Kicking the Clouds Away." In "S'Wonderful" on the desert island they rouse themselves and splash through water independent of each other. "Kicking the Clouds Away" is three minutes performed by the large chorus (not a lot of chorus in Fred and Ginger) and then the two of them in two minutes parade together in simple tap but are not in contact with each other still.

The finale of Crazy for You is the more classic twosome intertwined in graceful movement. That would remind me of Fred and Ginger romantic finales "Let's Face the Music and Dance" and "Never Gonna Dance" and others.

I really wasn't expecting much that night. I had seen one low budget production on PBS that barely held my interest. But that night in the far from intimate Geffen Hall there was just so much energy flowing that it more like being at an NBA playoff game. Perhaps you understand the phenomenon where I don't.

One good thing about not making it to Broadway: eight performances a week it could never live up to all the hype that the anniversary performance is being given. This way those of us who were there can continue to increase its legendary status. (But it was special. Complete strangers who exited the theater together were still talking to each other even after they they got on the subway train.)

Yes, in "Nice Work if You Can Get It" Kelli and Matthew -- well at least Kelli -- do a nice job singing "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," but fail to follow it up with the dance routine on roller skates that Fred and Ginger segue into.

They say that the soundtrack of "Shall We Dance" is the only place that you can hear certain orchestral themes by George Gershwin. I believe that they are reverse engineering the soundtrack and intend to come out with published sheet music within the next 10 or 20 years.

Dames at Sea was a long time ago and introduced us to Bernadette Peters, didn't it. This is when I get frustrated that there's no way for me to see Dames at Sea or My One and Only.

It's a movie musical rather than a Broadway musical, but I think that La La Land hits some of these marks and pays homage.

OlBlueEyes said: "Dames at Sea was a long time ago and introduced us to Bernadette Peters, didn't it. This is when I get frustrated that there's no way for me to see Dames at Sea or My One and Only."

There IS a way to see them, sort of. The Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (TOFT) has an archival video of the original 1984 production of My One and Only. Unfortunately, Dames at Sea -- the one with Bernadette -- predated the archive's existence, but there is a video of the 2015 revival at the Helen Hayes.

Until the former jockey passes, we will not see a musical based on Rogers and Astaire, which is unfortunate. It's still shocking what she did to poor Ginger at the Kennedy Center.

Not based upon Astaire/Rodgers, but I believe playing tribute to that era, how about the short-lived "High Society." (I know the movie musical is from the 50s, but the source, The Philadelphia Story, is 30s)

Cmorrow, thanks for all the great work the Lincoln Center library does, and especially TOFT, headed by Patrick Hoffman. By the way, did TOFT get to film ''Never Gonna Dance''?

Updated On: 8/28/19 at 04:12 PM

Tony Yazbeck seems to have been inspired by Fred & Ginger.