Crazy for You: Overture

The overture works like a musical trailer, stringing together some of Gershwin's most familiar tunes back to back rather than developing a single theme. It opens with a burst of brass and syncopated rhythm that announces the show's tap-dancing energy right away. From there the orchestra moves through a sequence of melodies drawn from Gershwin's songbook, songs originally written across several shows in the 1920s and 1930s and repackaged for Crazy for You, including "I Got Rhythm," "Embraceable You," and "Someone to Watch Over Me." Listen for the changes of mood between numbers: a brassy, dancing tune gives way to a slower, tender melody carried by strings or a solo woodwind, before the pace picks up again. There is no pause for applause between sections, the transitions are quick, sometimes just a chord or a drumroll bridging one song to the next. The orchestration favors bright colors, muted trumpets, clarinet slides, and busy string figures, all evoking the pit-orchestra sound of a Broadway show rather than a symphonic argument. The piece builds toward a big, upbeat finish, typically returning to the "I Got Rhythm" tune in an extended, energized final statement that brings the whole overture full circle.

Crazy for You opened on Broadway in 1992, a musical built around songs George Gershwin had written decades earlier with his brother Ira, reworked with a new book loosely based on their 1930 show Girl Crazy. Gershwin himself had died in 1937, so the overture heard in concert today is an arrangement assembled for the 1992 production, drawing together some of the era's most beloved songs into a single orchestral opener. Crazy for You was a commercial and critical success, winning the Tony Award for best musical, and it introduced Gershwin's songs to a new generation of theatergoers. The overture arrangement subsequently found a life beyond the theater, taken up by orchestras as a crowd-pleasing concert opener or pops program piece, valued for packing so many familiar tunes into a few compact minutes.