Anything Goes (Barbican Theatre London, PBS, 2021, originally aired May 11, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, May 26) I watched what turned out to be a repeat telecast from May 2022 of a performance of Cole Porter’s classic 1934 musical Anything Goes from the Barbican Theatre in London. I’ve seen the show “live” before at the late, lamented Starlight Bowl venue in Balboa Park in 1988, and I also think I saw a previous PBS telecast of the version presented at New York’s Lincoln Center in 1987 – though the Starlight Bowl production followed a revised version of the show created by Porter in 1962 and incorporating songs from some of his other shows into the score. That 1962 version, an off-Broadway production starring Eileen Rogers as Reno Sweeney, a disgraced ex-evangelist turned cabaret singer because she needed another way to make a living – a role Porter and librettists Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse originally wrote for the formidable Ethel Merman – and Hal “Barney Miller” Linden as the juvenile male lead, Billy Crocker – was the last Cole Porter musical produced on stage in New York during Porter’s lifetime. The show had something of a star-crossed history because it was originally supposed to be about a catastrophic shipwreck and a group of ill-assorted travelers stuck together on a desert island – but just as the show was about to start rehearsals a real-life ship disaster, a fire at sea aboard the S.S. Morro Castle, claimed the lives of 138 people. Producer Vinton Freedley decided that audiences would no longer find the subject of a ship disaster an appropriate subject for musical comedy, but he’d already ordered the expensive ship set built. With the original librettists, Bolton and Wodehouse, having returned to their native Britain and therefore no longer available for rewrites, Freedley had his chosen director, Lindsay, write a whole new script with nothing in common with the original except that both took place aboard an ocean liner making a transatlantic crossing.

Lindsay brought in Crouse – starting a writing partnership that lasted decades – and the two came up with a tale of Billy Crocker (Samuel Edwards), a junior stockbroker at the firm of Elisha “Eli” Whitney (Gary Wilmot), hopelessly in love with Hope Harcourt (Nicole-Lily Baisden), daughter of society lady Mrs. Evangeline Harcourt (Felicity Kendal). One problem is that Mrs. Harcourt has already arranged for Hope to marry Lord Evelyn Oakleigh (Haydn Oakley), a typically stuck-up upper-class British twit who carries with him a notebook in which he writes down American slang expressions – only he keeps getting them wrong. The company operating the ship, the S.S. American, is upset that there are no real celebrities aboard – Charlie Chaplin was scheduled to make the crossing on the American but at the last minute he took another company’s liner instead – and the closest they have to someone anyone’s heard of is Reno Sweeney (Sutton Foster, who first played the part in 2011 and won a Tony Award, her second, for it; she’s far more musical than Merman, but then there are rabid dogs out there more musical than Merman, and Foster actually phrases the songs quite well even though a few high notes are rather iffy – accidental or intentional on Foster’s part to make her seem more “Mermanesque”?) and Moonface Martin (Robert Lindsay), a hapless gangster who in the original script had to content himself with the title “Public Enemy No. 13.” There’s the predictable set of complications along the way, as at one point Billy is disguised as Snake-Eyes Johnson, Public Enemy No. 1, and it’s an indication of the loony-tunes comedy of this show that while people think he’s a hard-edged gangster he’s féted aboard the ship and becomes the toast of the voyage, while when he’s exposed as an innocent naïf he’s thrown into the ship’s brig along with Martin. Eventually all works out and Billy and Hope get married, as do Evelyn and Reno, and Eli and Mrs. Harcourt; in the original script the three weddings take place on Evelyn’s estate in Britain, but in this version they take place on the S.S. American just before it docks, with the ship’s captain officiating.

What has kept this show on the world’s various stages is Cole Porter’s score – though some of the best-known songs in it are actually from some of his other shows, and one great song, “Easy to Love,” was originally written for Anything Goes but was cut from the show in early rehearsals because it contained notes too high for the original Billy Crocker, William Gaxton. (It made its debut in Porter’s film score for his first original movie, 1936’s Born to Dance, with a singer with even weaker high notes than Gaxton’s: James Stewart, who actually boasted in the first That’s Entertainment compilation film from 1974 that it was a tribute to the greatness of the song and Porter’s enormous talent as a songwriter that “Easy to Love” became a standard despite him introducing it.) Among the Porter classics here are the title song, “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “All Through the Night” and a great mock spiritual called “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” that keys off Reno’s past as an evangelist before some unspecified scandal tumbled her off the top of the Bible biz. (I suspect the original book writers were thinking of Aimée Semple McPherson, whose promising career as the first radio evangelist crashed and burned when she faked her own kidnapping to spend a hot weekend with her radio engineer.)

There were actually quite a few pop spirituals written around this time, including “Sing, You Sinners,” “Is That Religion?,” “Stay on the Right Side of the Road,” “The Lonesome Road” (written by white singer Gene Austin and brilliantly covered by Louis Armstrong in 1931 in what was arguably the first rap record; he plays “Reverend Satchelmouth” and in the record’s funniest line he tells his congregation, “I’d like to thank you for your offering. Of course, it could have been better; $2 more and I could have got my shoes out of pawn”) and the two Bessie Smith recorded stunningly in 1930, “On Revival Day” and “Moan, You Mourners.” (Bessie sang these songs with so much more authority and power than she brought to the increasingly tawdry and sexually explicit blues material Columbia was given her then that I’ve often wondered how her career – and her life – might have gone if she, like Ethel Waters and Robert Wilkins, had become a born-again Christian and re-invented herself as a gospel singer.) I hadn’t seen any version of Anything Goes in decades and I remember the script’s humor as being less low-brow than the version presented here – but the cast was first-rate all around (despite the modern-day annoyance of so-called “non-traditional casting” in which we’re expected to believe that Mrs. Harcourt is white and her daughter is Black) and the ensemble dancing, especially in the two big tap numbers, truly spectacular. The Brits certainly did a good job with one of the crown jewels of American musical theatre!