YOU’LL GET A REEL KICK OUT OF THIS
Anything Goes in this ‘delicious fluffy soufflé’ of sheer fun, farce and frolics
Anything Goes Bord Gáis Theatre
Wuntil 28 May ★★★★★
hen England cricket captain DavidGowerwas being mauled at a press conference in 1989, with all the usual tedious questions about what he was going to do about the team’s poor performance, he finally lost patience, stood up, and declared, ‘I’m off to the theatre to see Anything Goes’.
It was one of the most sensible answers I’ve ever heard from a sportsman under siege. If he couldn’t relax with the press he could sure as hell relax with a show that’s a delicious fluffy soufflé of tongue-in-cheek action and a huge cast that makes intricate tap dancing look like simple fun. This is the resurrection of the glitz and glam of Broadway in the Thirties.
The show was launched in 1934, in the middle of America’s Great Depression, when a show with songs had only one aim – to cheer up a depressed population. The libretto, (the book) was by Guy Bolton and PG Wodehouse, masters of the pratfall, quirky characters, and snappy dialogue.
When it was revived in 1962 and at regular intervals after that, the book was rewritten by at least four other writers and expanded with the addition of other top Cole Porter songs from his previous shows, including It’s De-lovely, Friendship, and Easy To Love.
The story, if you could call it that, has a ship travelling from New York to England with a mix of the mad, the bad, the beautiful, the wealthy and the lovelorn, all getting mixed up at a hectic pace. At times it has the cut of a Carry On film.
Billy loves the wealthy Hope Harcourt (Nicole-Lily Baisden), but she’s engaged to goofball Wodehousian aristocrat Lord Oakleigh. Reno, evangelising singer, loves Billy (cue I Get A Kick Out Of You). There’s mistaken identity, daft disguises, a gangster, Moonface Martin (Denis Lawson) disguised as a clergyman, and Simon Callow as the shifty stockbroker Elisha Whitney. And that barely touches the size of the cast.
There are touches of PG Wodehouse still in the script, plus a lot of updating to give the sexual comedy a more modern edge, along with some colour-blind casting. The end of the first act provides a whopper of a tap dance routine to accompany Anything
Goes. And the second act has a similar whirlwind of a performance as evangelist Reno (Kerry Ellis), does a quick strip-off with her group of angelic showgirls, and puts on a confessional sequence, complete with a dazzling song and dance version of Blow, Gabriel, Blow.
The other big production number was The Gypsy In Me that lets the oddball Lord Oakleigh (Haydn Oakley) shed his bumbling persona and overwhelm Reno with a spectacular voluptuous flourish.
There’s an inevitable clash between the serious love interests and the general chaotic nature of the show, but the audience was in no mood to nitpick occasional lapses in singing or pace and an overlong first act, and roared its approval at the end.
■ Dublin Dance Festival closes this week with two productions at The Abbey. Any Attempt Will End In Crushed Bodies And Shattered Bones (May 27–28) takes its name from a statement by Chinese leader Xi Jinping about language inciting violence from any source.
The presentation is described as a hymn to rebellion, civil disobedience and the march towards progress.
The 17-strong dance ensemble has performers aged 17–70, each attempting to express their own voice through movement.
Fallen From Heaven (May 24– 25) features Rocío Molina and Carlos Marquerie in what has been described as an explosive, theatrical and provocative work that fuses traditional flamenco dance and feminism. Reviews of Molina’s dancing have described it as ‘a mixture of intensity of traditional styles, surreal fantasy and unpredictable humour’ – with guitar, percussion and electronics. Both shows run for 90 minutes without an interval.