‘Anything Goes’ gets a reboot
Script writers feed audiences enough history to enjoy revival of the 1930s musical.
The Broadway show “Anything Goes” has quite the pedigree.
The original 1934 Broadway musical starred Ethel Merman and featured a Cole Porter score with hits such as “I Get A Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “All Through the Night” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” The book about the misadventures of four people setting a course for love on a transatlantic cruise in the 1930s was written by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse and almost immediately rewritten by director Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.
For the 1987 revival starring Patti LuPone , the book was revised by Russel Crouse’s son Timothy Crouse and his college pal John Weidman. That’s the version, which won six Tony Awards, coming to the Broward Center for the Performing Arts for a two-week run beginning Tuesday. To pull off the revival, the two writers had to find ways to refresh some references.
“We figured that some significant proportion of the audience would not be familiar with the history of the 1930s,” Timothy Crouse says. “So we had to find artful, indirect ways to feed them information about the crash, about tycoons who had lost everything jumping off a ledge and the whole concept of the ‘30s. You can come into the show knowing very little about what the ‘30s were about and still have a good time.”
Weidman (“Assassins,” “Contact,” “Big: The Musical”) adds that the very construct of a show from the 1930s didn’t translate in 1987 when their rewrites hit the stage and it certainly wouldn’t work in the 21st century.
“In 1934, there were certain musical-theater conventions that don’t apply in the mid ’80s, when we went to work on the book,” Weidman explains. “For example, there were pages and pages of dialogue between songs. There was a different kind of balance between the score and the book.”
They also highlighted the income-inequality aspect of the story, which was certainly there in the Depression-era run of “Anything Goes.”
“[The show is now] satirical of the 1 percenters,” says Crouse, a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine and the Village Voice newspaper. “There are those who have all the money, or who have the lion’s share of the money … who are extremely rich and have no interest in those who aren’t rich. Along the way, they get their comeuppance.”
Aside from attracting the stage’s brightest stars — William Gaxton, Hal Linden, Leslie Uggams, Elaine Page, John Barrowman and Jessica Walter — the show has its own Broadway lore. Reportedly, Russel Crouse spent opening night in front of the Colonial Theatre in Boston imploring his friends to skip the show.
“That’s the story he told me, so I’m sure it’s true,” Timothy Crouse says. “But the friends went in, anyway, and they all had a great time. It was a hit right from the beginning, and it was one of the big hits of the year.”
“Anything Goes” runs through May 17 at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., in Fort Lauderdale. Showtimes are 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays (6:30 p.m. Sunday), with 2 p.m. matinees Saturdays (and Wednesday, May 13) and 1 p.m. matinees Sundays..