Anything Goes comes from the era when musicals were musical comedies, and the music was the important thing. Stories were just something to bridge the gap from one song to the next. Admittedly, there were some madcap romps that came from this era – and Anything Goes certainly is one – but holes in the plot lines were not anything to worry about.
So please don’t worry about any gaps in the story at New Line’s latest production of this Cole Porter feast. Just sit back and enjoy the music.
There are several versions of the 1934 show as it’s been updated over the years – in fact, it was updated before it even opened. It was supposed to take place on a luxury liner where a bomb goes off. Then there was a fire on a passenger ship, the S.S. Moro Castle. More than 130 people died, and it was decided that in the interests of good taste (Remember that? Anyone?) they would remove the disaster as the premise of the show. (And does this sound too familiar these days?)
This version takes place totally on the ship, with fewer than average crew and passengers. But the great Cole Porter music is front and center, and that’s the most important thing. Porter used words almost as well as he used music, but the lyrics are still fun. The time is rapidly approaching when hardly anyone alive will understand most of the references here, which often refer to events around the time of its creation. (New Line artistic director Scott Miller decided to actually create a glossary of the things that might be unrecognizable and post it on his blog.)
Still, there are some great word plays like “tinpantithesis”. Music, though, doesn’t become dated so easily and these are glorious tunes.
Directors Scott Miller and Mike Dowdy-Windsor make sure that everyone has a good time in this very broad comedy whose social implications – lionizing people who are criminals, religious hypocrisy – are easily relatable in today’s world. Club owner and former evangelist Reno Sweeney is Sarah Porter, who belts much of the score (originally performed by Ethel Merman) with aplomb, although seems a little less steady on one ballad. Billy Crocker, a young broker who stows away for love, brought to us by Evan Fornachon, is believable, clearly smitten with Eileen Engel as Hope Harcourt, a debutante who’s on board, too. Engel in particular sounds great. She’s already engaged to the aristocrat Sir Evelyn Oakley. He’s Zachary Allen Farmer, in a very different role for him but great fun to watch. Mother Harcourt, Kimmie Kidd-Booker, gives zest and appropriate outrage to the would-be-mother-in-law without making us smell the mothballs of stuffiness. Aaron Allen and Sarah Gene Dowling are a couple of criminals on the lam, Allen having a great time with his song “Be Like the Bluebird”. As I listened to the title song and watched Dowling, I was suddenly reminded a little of the late Charlotte Peters, whose theme song it was on her noontime television show in the Fifties. And it’s fun watching Jeffrey Wright, who’s Elisha Whitney, Billy’s boss. Wright looks the very model of a television sitcom actor of the Fifties, and handles the considerable physical comedy very well.
Nicolas Valdez is the music director, and choreography comes from Michelle Sauer and Sara Rae Womack, two of the four Angels that are Reno’s chorus girls – the others are Larissa White and Alyssa Wolf. Colene Fornachon is responsible for the costumes, several of which are downright covetable.
All in all, maybe it’s not perfect, but it surely is a great deal of fun, especially if you have the least bit of romantic in you. And pay attention to the Marx Brothers reference. (Actually, there are two.)
Anything Goes
through March 24
New Line Theatre
Marcelle Theatre
3310 Samuel Shephard Drive