Rachel York as Reno Sweeney, center, flanked by her fallen angels. Photograph courtesy of the Fox Theatre.
When my dearest friend from high school suggested a pilgrimage to Anything Goes at the Fox, I groaned. Two women in their fifties singing along under their breath—no doubt audibly—and giggling at inexplicable moments? We’d run the box office for our high school’s production of this musical, forging a lifelong friendship over a muddled series of seating charts and systems. After each production, we’d hugged our sweaty, radiant friends who could sing and told them how great they’d been. But that was a long time ago…
Then the songs started going through my head, and I wondered: Just what did Cole Porter do to make them stick for decades?
Maybe we should go see. Besides, it’d be fun to hear somebody besides Susie provoke that line we teased her about for the next three years: “She’s not confessin’, she’s advertising!”
Opening night—a Tuesday, yet—the Fox was packed. We elbowed our way through the Art Deco lobby, which, restored to 1929, made a perfect segue to the 1930s glitz and vaudeville of Cole Porter’s show. OK, I thought, taking a deep breath. Here we go.
And then the music started.
And all those catchy, delightful and delovely songs still worked.
Porter’s music and lyrics are inseparable, and their mood doesn’t just match the show, it sweeps the audience into its silliness. The production numbers looked flawless—granted, I just ran the box office, so this is not professional criticism here—and the show sustained a high (but not manic) energy and crisp pacing. Not once did I detect the bored rustling or throat-clearing of an audience member whose attention has flagged.
You read about Ethel Merman’s Reno Sweeney, and Patti Lupone’s, and Sutton Foster’s even, in the Broadway run of this revival. But Rachel York held her own. She projected that blend of exuberance, goofiness, sex, and arch wit that belongs best in the ’30s. She could dance. And her voice filled the Fox, a tough act for the ingenue’s thin soprano to follow. Seconded only by Fred Applegate as Moonface Martin, she stole the show.
The sets were elegant, scene transitions smooth, gags played with enough irony to let me feel nostalgic for the period, and not embarrassed for the people in it. The plot’s goofy, but the acting was natural enough to steer clear of cheesiness. I wondered how much that had to do with Cole Porter being gay in both senses of the word: Playful enough, after all his years in high society, to romp, and detached enough to raise one eyebrow at traditional romance.
Freshman year in high school, I’m not sure I knew what “gay” meant yet. I know I didn’t understand the Yale Eli bulldog stuff, and the class and socioeconomic rifts, and I had no idea who P.G. Wodehouse was, let alone that he’d written the original book. Returning to the show, I’m shocked by things we’d seen without really grasping, and surprised, too, that they’d played in the ’30s. In some ways, Anything Goes fits better with our era—our craving for celebrity, our lax morals, our hyperawareness of the class divide, our desperate need for escape—than it did with the ’70s.
Roundabout Theatre Company won a 2011 Tony Award for this revival of Anything Goes, and Kathleen Marshall, who both directed and choreographed, won Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics awards for choreography plus nominations for direction.
Now the show’s on tour, and the whole country’s seeing it the way I did, as a delightful return to a questionable innocence we’ve never quite escaped.
Anything Goes runs through June 9 at the Fox Theatre, 527 N. Grand. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8pm, Saturday and Sunday 2pm, except for Sunday, June 2 (performance at 7:30pm) and Thursday, June 6 (performance at 1pm). Tickets are $15 to $64. For more information, call 314-534-1678.
