Saturday, June 2, 2012

Anything Goes Review

Theater Review | 'Anything Goes'

A Glimpse of Stocking? Shocking!



Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Anything Goes, with Sutton Foster, center, a Roundabout Theater Company revival at the Stephen Sondheim Theater. More Photos »

Published: April 7, 2011
Who needs a brass section when you’ve got Sutton Foster? As the nightclub evangelist Reno Sweeney in the zesty new revival of “Anything Goes,” which opened on Thursday night at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, Ms. Foster has the voice of a trumpet and a big, gleaming presence that floods the house. When she leads the show-stopping “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” you figure that if no horn-tooting archangel appears, it’s only because he’s afraid of the competition.
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Getting to the Bottom of ‘You’re the Top’
Excerpt: 'Anything Goes'

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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Joel Grey and Sutton Foster in the Broadway revival of "Anything Goes."
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Ms. Foster is playing a part originated by the all-time musical-comedy queen of brass, Ethel Merman, who was said to be the heart and soul (as well as lungs) of “Anything Goes” when it opened on Broadway in 1934. Certainly that is the role served to the brimming point by Ms. Foster in Kathleen Marshall’s production of this willfully silly tale of love, deception and celebrity-chasing on the high seas, which features a deluxe candy box of songs by Cole Porter.
Both goofy and sexy, shruggingly insouciant and rigorously polished, Ms. Foster’s performance embodies the essence of escapist entertainment in the 1930s, when hard times called for bold smiles, tough wisecracks and defiant fantasies of over-the-top opulence. That’s the tone that Ms. Marshall is going for in this Roundabout Theater Company production. And to achieve it she’s enlisted a team that includes Derek McLane (for the bright Deco sets), Martin Pakledinaz (for the matching sassy costumes) and the peerless Rob Fisher (for the musical supervision and vocal arrangements).
No revisionist shadows for this version of the show that gave us the immortal standards “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “Anything Goes,” among others. Ms. Marshall and her singing dancers and comic actors — a motley crew that includes Joel Grey, Jessica Walter, Adam Godley and John McMartin — are here not to make sense of the world but to help us forget it for a couple of hours. (Think of it as an alternative for folks who aren’t ready for the foulmouthed “Book of Mormon.”)
So be willing to suspend your need for logic and your intolerance for groaning jokes. There’s a reason this musical is called “Anything Goes.” It’s a farrago of zinger-stocked dialogue, vaudeville-style antics and musical numbers only pretending to co-exist as a coherent plot.
The vicissitudes the original production underwent included having to jettison a large part of the original script (which involved a shipwreck) after a fire on a cruise ship killed 134 people. The first team of writers, P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, had moved on to other projects, so Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse were brought on, beginning a collaboration that would peak with the long-running “Life With Father.” (The current version features additions and revisions by Timothy Crouse, son of Russel, and John Weidman, who had performed the same function for the 1987 Lincoln Center Theater revival, which starred Patti LuPone.)
Showbiz legend has it that the title came about during chaotic out-of-town rehearsals when the leading man, William Gaxton, was asked if he would object to making an early entrance and replied, “In this kind of a spot, anything goes!” And so it does. If the show could be said to be about anything, it’s about improvising and vamping your way out of a tight corner.
Consider some of the dramatis personae who assemble in New York on the deck of a London-bound luxury liner: Reno Sweeney, the onetime evangelist who has become a naughty nightclub star (imagine Aimee Semple McPherson transformed into Texas Guinan); Moonface Martin (Mr. Grey), a gangster fleeing the law by pretending to be a priest; and Billy Crocker (Colin Donnell) a young stockbroker who winds up pretending to be a sailor (and later a gangster) to pursue a lovely debutante.
That would be Hope Harcourt (Laura Osnes) whose nouveau pauvre mother, Evangeline (Ms. Walter), has betrothed her daughter to the wealthy Lord Evelyn Oakleigh (Mr. Godley), in a bid to restore the family fortunes. In the meantime the ship’s Captain (Walter Charles) is desperately looking for a few famous names to parade before his celebrity-hungry passengers. (The first line of the show’s title song is “Times have changed,” but in some ways they obviously haven’t.)
How these mixed nuts collaborate with and fool one another involves much strutting of assorted, sometimes tedious, comic styles. As a nearsighted Wall Street tycoon (and Crocker’s boss), Mr. McMartin, that invaluable Broadway veteran, brings a delicious giddiness to elderly lust and Ivy League juvenility. Playing an English aristo in love with American slang, a very game Mr. Godley (“Private Lives” on Broadway) makes merry with malapropisms. Jessica Stone is a salty treat as a sailor-chasing gangster’s moll. And Mr. Grey does his time-tested combination of music-hall shtick and “little ol’ me” puckishness that became his post-“Cabaret” signature when he appeared in “George M!” 43 years ago.

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 11, 2011
A theater review on Friday about the new Broadway revival of “Anything Goes” misstated the year of the Lincoln Center Theater revival of the show that starred Patti LuPone. It was 1987, not 1982.
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