Five reasons to check out Crazy For You at Yellowknife’s NACC

Gershwin comedy musical Crazy For You opens in Yellowknife on Thursday, featuring a gold mining town losing its theatre. Sound familiar?

This time around, the town is Deadrock and the theatre is more the tread-the-boards kind, rather than the movie theatre that just shut down in the NWT’s capital.

Even so, there are parallels. Crazy For You sees a coalition of well wishers and artistic types try to keep Deadrock’s theatre alive in a stage show packed with 1930s musical exuberance.

Ptarmigan Ptheatrics’ performance of Crazy For You runs April 23-26 and April 29-May 2 at 7:30pm most nights, with a 2pm Sunday matinee on April 26. Tickets are available from the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre’s website.

We spent time with some of the cast and director Sean Daly at a rehearsal this week. Here are five things we learned that made us eager for the show.

1. The tap dancing

Yellowknife won’t have seen much to match the tap dancing on offer in Crazy For You.

Cast members were put through their paces by Bella Dance Academy’s Phoenix Smith, and at times the stage will be packed with tap.

“I didn’t really know there was tap in the play when I went to the audition,” said Emma Taylor, who plays Mitzi, a member of a collective named the Follies who are central to proceedings in Deadrock.

“When they said ‘Do you know how to tap dance?’ I was like: ‘When I was six years old.’ I ended up throwing on some tap shoes that were a size too big,” Taylor said, “and now I’m here.”

The process of earning the right to play Mitzi was ultimately “less of a tap audition and more of a boot camp,” she said.

“It was like: Here, learn how to do these moves, learn this little part from the play, and now do it in an hour and see how you do.

“Sean [Daly, the director] was there and he was looking at everyone’s feet, then he chose his favourite Follies.”

“I think that’s going to be really cool, seeing a mass amount of people tapping on stage,” said Shaelah Buckley Hoekstra, who plays female lead Polly Baker, daughter of the Deadrock theatre’s owner.

She’s excited by “just the big show pizzazz of it. It’s a very showy performance.”

In general, the choreography wows even the cast.

Christian Laroche was an actor in Halifax before moving to Yellowknife, at which point he thought he would be leaving theatre behind. He’s impressed that Ptarmigan Ptheatrics is taking on Crazy For You, in which he plays antagonist Lank Hawkins.

“We absolutely have no business doing this show. This is crazy,” Laroche told Cabin Radio.

“There are theatres back home that would have looked at the choreography necessary for this show and just would have gone: No.

“That’s part of what makes it so fun. We know it’s not going to be maybe Broadway-calibre singing, acting, dancing, but we’re going to do our best to hit that. You have that motivation, you throw yourself into the character so much more, and you might end up coming out with something that maybe is on par with what you would see in a bigger city.”

“They say you can teach a monkey to dance in 500 hours,” acknowledged director Daly, “and some years, we do that.”

2. The Gershwins

If you know the name Gershwin but your knowledge stops there, this is a great way to become familiar with some of their work.

George and Ira Gershwin were a songwriting duo who helped define the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 1930s. George only lived to be 38, passing away in 1937 – seven years after he wrote the music for the show Girl Crazy, with lyrics by older brother Ira.

Crazy For You was invented in the early 1990s as a revival of parts of Girl Crazy with more Gershwin music bolted on. You get the best of Girl Crazy plus numbers the Gershwins penned for Fred Astaire movies of the 1930s and two of their compositions that were considered lost for half a century.

“This show was written in the 1990s, when there was a resurgence in understanding the contributions of George and Ira Gershwin,” said Daly.

“It was created from a show they wrote in the 1930s, but then it morphed.

“It’s perfect for people who like romantic songs, hijinks and farce. It’s good, clean fun for everyone.”

Crazy For You’s 1992 Broadway debut won three Tony Awards, including being named that year’s best musical.

3. The production standards

Some of the cast members in Crazy For You are there in part because they were so taken with previous Yellowknife productions.

In recent years, the likes of The Rocky Horror Show, We Will Rock You and 9 to 5 have received rave reviews and encouraged more people to get involved.

“I did theatre in high school, then I graduated, went to college and came back. Last fall, I went to Rocky Horror and realized I hadn’t been taking the advantages of community theatre,” said Taylor.

“When I showed up the first time to the cast rehearsal, I was just so excited that I’d actually get to perform with people who were in Rocky Horror.

“[Rocky Horror] just clicked a switch in my brain, and I was like, ‘I want to meet these people and I want to be in a play with them.’ It was very inspiring.”

For Laroche, seeing We Will Rock You was what made him realize he had a theatre future in Yellowknife after his time in Halifax.

“I moved up here with the idea that I was leaving that chapter of my life behind, because I was going to come to a place where there was no theatre – at least, that’s the assumption I had in my head,” he said.

“And then last year, I saw the production of We Will Rock You, and I was like, ‘Nope, this is definitely something I’m going to continue doing,’ because that looked like a lot of fun.”

4. The comparison

“We’re not trying to hit the nail too hard on the head,” joked Daly of Crazy For You’s setting and its Yellowknife echoes: the theatre closing in a mining town.

For the Yellowknife production’s purposes, though, Deadrock is being turned into more of a “northwest” town than the western US town in the original.

“I feel that there are some cheeky parallels that fit in well with Yellowknife,” said Buckley Hoekstra.

“There’s a lot of arts happening in Yellowknife and lots of really talented people, which is kind of a part of this – all these hidden gems of really talented people in the town that are discovered through doing the production. So it feels very relevant to Yellowknife.”

In Crazy For You, not unlike Yellowknife, there’s also the idea that tourism can help Deadrock’s future. In the show, Deadrock’s saloon stages gunfights as a tourist attraction and the town is being assessed by writers of a famed guidebook.

5. The people

Being in Crazy For You means a lot to the cast.

Buckley Hoekstra has only thrown herself into theatre as an adult after earning her music degree.

“I needed a push for some change in my life. I was going through a bit of a hard period, and then ended up doing 9 to 5 about three years ago, and that really helped me to get through that period,” she said.

“It’s been something that really nourishes me since then.”

Daly is able to channel his time into a production like this after retiring from his job as an arts educator.

“When I was raising a family with my wife, at various times I could not be involved in these kinds of endeavours,” he said. “So it’s fun to be able to say, OK, I can spend the days and the time needed to help put this together.”

Taylor, making her Ptarmigan Ptheatrics debut, is thrilled to have joined an “amazing community.”

“I’ve met so many people. Adam, who I’m doing a duet with in the show, is also an amazing ballroom dancer, and he’s taught me how to ballroom, which I’ve always wanted to learn how to do.

“I hope to see them now in the grocery store and say hello and ‘see you next year.'”