There's an Old Australian Bush Song

Almost every song in Cole Porter's Anything Goes score has a trick or a central joke to it.

Now to be fair, that's not true of every song in the original 1934 production, which included some very conventional musical comedy songs, among its sharp satire. But with the 1962 revival, its deletion of those more conventional songs and the addition of quite a few Porter songs from other musicals -- the '62 revival essentially created a Porter "greatest hits" show, sort of like My One and Only.

And with this new Frankenstein score, it really is true that almost every song brings some awesome surprises.

More so than most musicals, quite a few songs in Anything Goes (talking about the '62 version) are diegetic, meaning the act of singing is part of the action, and not just the language of the storytelling. In Anything Goes, the characters clearly know they're singing in "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" and "Public Enemy Number One," "Let's Step Out," and "Heaven Hop" (since they describe the dance in the lyric), "Be Like the Bluebird" ("an old Australian bush song" which Moon says he'll "render" for Billy); and arguably "You're the Top," "Friendship," and "Anything Goes." The only songs that are definitely not diegetic are "All Through the Night," "I Get a Kick Out of You," and maybe "De-Lovely." Certainly in "You're the Top," "Friendship," and "De-Lovely," they are at least joking and/or performing for each other, if not "singing."

There's so much to this score that people don't recognize...

"You're the Top" is one of the theatre's great list songs. Billy and Hope are ironically complimenting each other by comparing their charms to celebrities and trendy brand names -- essentially turning Gandhi, Botticelli, and the Mona Lisa into consumer brands. And notice how often the lyric sets old European images (the Tower of Pisa) against the newest American images of the moment (cellophane), again a very subtle nod to the coming story, in which Hope has to choose between Old Europe (Evelyn) and up-to-date America (Billy).

More than anything, "You're the Top" is just a big goof, but one with a pretty sharp satiric edge. Though it's awfully subtle, it lays down one of the two central themes of the show, our American obsession with celebrity and consumerism. It's almost a love song, but it comically filters that love through the ironic lens of materialism and celebrity worship: I love you because you're as wonderful as Ovaltine. And that irony supports the story here, since Reno has feelings for Billy, but Billy doesn't feel the same.

"It's De-Lovely" pokes fun at lyricists like Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg, who made up crazy words in their lyrics, something Porter actually did a lot less. More often than not, when a Porter song does it, it's because the characters are "playing;" so the made-up words help define character and maybe story. Notice how organically the gimmick is used in this song -- the first time, we hear two real words first ("it's delightful, it's delicious") and then the made-up word ("it's de-lovely"). The more we get into the song, the sillier the words get.

But Porter earns it all with his invention of the word "tinpantithesis," in Hope's intro verse, a made-up word that towers above those of Gershwin and Harburg. Hope worries that her song/singing may be the opposite -- the antithesis -- of "melody," i.e., good music, pretty music. But it's not just the opposite, she's warning him; it's also kind of tacky and common. It's the Tin Pan Alley antithesis of good music, or in Porterspeak, the "Tinpantithesis." That's awfully good writing, and particularly fun in the middle of a song about making up words. Ultimately Hope decides the embarrassment is not worth it, and she'll "skip the damn thing and sing the refrain." But by the time she makes this decision, she has already finished the verse -- about whether or not to sing the verse. That's incredibly "meta" for 1934 -- she's literally singing about her singing.

But what many people miss is -- Hope is making a joke! Billy has been clowning around, and Hope decides to join the fun. It's the first time we see the "fun" Hope; and the first time we really see that there's a Carefree Hope that Billy rode around the park with all night, and there's a Respectable Hope who has accepted her obligations dutifully. Which Hope wins the tug-of-war will tell us who'll she marry.

As if we don't already know.

Also interesting is the ethnic dialect humor, still part of American comedy in 1934 -- "d'vallop" (the wallop, as in "it packs a wallop," i.e., a powerful effect), "de vinner" (the winner), "d'voiks" (the works, meaning "it's everything"). A side note: I've also discovered that in the 1930s, "wallop" was a slang word for beer. I don't think that's connected to this, but I couldn't swear to it...

"Heaven Hop" makes fun of the pop songs that invented new dance "crazes" in the 20s and 30s, cataloging the the moves in their lyrics. Even though this song isn't originally from Anything Goes, it fits surprisingly well here, since we have some angels hanging around.

"Friendship" is one of three songs in the show in which characters are just playing, and consciously trying to amuse -- even crack up -- their friends, alongside "You're the Top" and "It's De-Lovely." It's interesting that both Reno and Billy and are in two of those songs, and Billy is in all three; they are the "playful" characters, from whom the other characters have to learn about joy before our story ends.

"I Get a Kick Out of You" is much more intense than we recognize, maybe because we know it too well. But what's the central point of this song? I don't feel emotions and never have, but I"m starting to feel something for the first time. Literally "everything leaves me totally cold." That's quite an admission from the saucy, sassy, smartass speakeasy hostess. None of the usual thrills -- alcohol, drugs, or adventure (flying in a plane) -- can thrill her, only "you." And then right before the final verse, we find out her love is not returned. Wow.

In the original version, Reno starts the show with this, and it's about her feelings for Billy. In the revivals, this song comes along late in Act I, and now it's about Reno's feelings for Evelyn. It's much stronger in terms of story structure when it comes later -- here it reveals something we're already suspecting, and it sets up one of the narrative threads that will get resolved in Act II.

I know Porter loved to use the latest slang (like George M. Cohan), and it occurred to me that that meaning of the word kick might have been really new at that moment. But according to several sources, kick meaning "surge or fit of pleasure" (often as kicks) goes back to 1941, though the related meaning; "stimulation from liquor or drugs" (the first two verses) goes back to 1844. Anything Goes opened in 1934. Did Porter put that later meaning into our language?

Or are we reading that word differently than Porter meant it? Was he using that older meaning in a new way, suggesting that for Reno this feeling of love is a jolt of intoxication, not just a nice diversion...? Or does it feel that way to Reno because she's never felt anything before...?

By the time we get to the title song, almost every character has been thrown for a loop. Almost every character's world has been thrown out of balance. And everybody in the audience knows what that feels like. And then Reno says (sings) what we all know:

Life is Fucking Crazy. Literally anything goes.

The title of the show and the Act I finale has gotten too familiar to us. The impact of the phrase, "Anything Goes," has dulled over the years, maybe because it's always associated with this "old musical." But this lyric is incredibly well-crafted and tells us so much about that moment in our history, in the midst of great cultural changes. By the end of the song, we realize the title refers ironically both to the wild abandon of the 20s, and the unbelievable hardship and challenges of the 30s, yin and yang. You can read my detailed analysis of the lyric here.

The end of the first act leaves us with a plot cliff-hanger (has Billy lost both hope and Hope?), a big, noisy, full-company dance number, but also a feeling of slight unease -- our world really is that fucked up! Especially in the Trump era, it seems that literally anything goes, and that's as scary as it is freeing.

And then off you go to intermission..

"Public Enemy Number One," a satiric hymn, starts Act II with what feels like a one-joke throwaway, but it's not. This song is the convergence of the show's two main themes -- the way Americans turn religion into show business and criminals into celebrities. In this song, they turn a (supposed) criminal into a celebrity, and then into a religious figure, in a satiric exaggeration of the public's love affair with real celebrity criminals of the 30s, like Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, et al. The irony here is even thicker because the audience knows Billy isn't really a criminal -- and inside the story, so do Moon, Bonnie, Reno, and Hope.

(I love that the big-time gangster Snake Eyes Johnson has a moll named Bonnie, presumably after Bonnie Parker...)

It's also interesting to note that in 1934, the Anything Goes audience wasn't there to see if Billy and Hope got together in the end. They were there to see three top show biz celebrities, Ethel Merman, William Gaxton, and Victor Moore -- and arguably by this point, Cole Porter himself was as big a celebrity. The audience was laughing at the onstage passengers being seduced by celebrity, but the audience had been too...

"Let's Step Out" is a curious 1962 interpolation to me. The lyric says virtually nothing the Act I finale didn't already cover ("So let's run wild, let's be fools, let's go crazy and break the rules!"), and there are already plenty of songs in Act II, more than in the original. Maybe it was just an excuse to get some more dance into the show...? The later revivals took this one back out.

"Let's Misbehave," on the other hand, was a brilliant '62 interpolation. Evelyn didn't get a song in 1934, because he was more a device than a main character. In 1962, with more focus on the Evelyn-Reno romance, the two of them got "Let's Misbehave" in Act II, which helps the audience root for this relationship. In the '87 revival, Evelyn got "The Gypsy in Me" instead, which had belonged to Hope in '34. And while "Gypsy" is a fun number for Evelyn, "Let's Misbehave" is much better at character, relationship, and plot advancement.

We don't just need to know Evelyn will loosen up; we need to know he's found his primal animal side ("we're merely mammals"), and also how perfectly he and Reno fit each other. Note that while Billy and Hope get songs about marriage ("De-Lovely") and chaste yearning ("All Through the Night"), Evelyn and Reno get a song about carnality. Evelyn doesn't invoke Romeo and Juliet, or Abelard and Heloise; no, he invokes Adam and Eve -- lovers in a state of pure nature, before morality, before judgment, before clothing. We are indeed in Shakespeare's woods here, and Reno and Evelyn are de-coupling from the wrong partners and re-coupling here with the right partners.

That's why we're here, after all. It's sort of parallel to A Midsummer Night's Dream, if you think of the starry night sky, or maybe Cole Porter's intoxicating score, as a substitute for Puck's magic drops. The show works less well without "Let's Misbehave" in that spot.

"Blow, Gabriel, Blow" runs head-on at one of the show's two main themes, the turning of religion into show business. You can read my deep dive into this song here.

"All Through the Night" has a fairly conventional early musical comedy point -- we can only be together in our dreams! In the '62 version, Billy and Hope sing exactly the same verses; in '34 the second verse was slightly altered. Though the lyric is fairly conventional, delivering no information we don't already have, dealing in awfully conventional images, the music is extraordinary.

I've always maintained that musicals are more powerful, more impactful, more emotional than plays, because of the abstract nature of music, the non-verbal language of emotion. "All Through the Night" lacks the irony of the rest of the score, but it works so well because the music tells us as much (or more) about Billy and Hope's feelings than the words do. Almost the entire main melody descends chromatically by half-steps, making the music feel like it doesn't have a home key, like the melody is just spinning out spontaneously, endlessly shifting back and forth between major and minor, happy and sad -- and sinking ever further down into despair. It's anchor-less, restless, uneasy, but also hauntingly beautiful.

The original version of the show used "All Through the Night" midway through Act I, as Billy and Hope's first song together. In that spot, it's too serious, too sincere for this crazy romp of a show, but repositioned here in Act II (where there was originally only a short reprise), it works beautifully.

"Be Like the Bluebird" may be my favorite song in the show. It's so crazy and so meta! Take a look at Mooney's intro verse:

There's an old Australian bush song,
That Melba used to sing,
A song that always cheered me
When I was blue.
Even Melba said this bush song
Was a helluva song to sing,
So be quiet whilst I render it for you...

There's so much that's funny about this. First, Mooney starts by invoking the famous Australian opera singer Dame Nellie Melba (for whom Melba Toast is named), who had just died in 1931. A "bush song" is an Australian folk song (one famous example of this is "Waltzing Matilda"). It's funny that this world famous opera singer would think this folk song is "a helluva song to sing" -- does that mean it's a great song or a hard song? After all, Mooney himself then sings it. And as we listen to it, we realize this is not an Australian bush song -- it's just a Cole Porter comedy number. But that intro turns the whole thing into a very wacky joke. Also, Mooney is singing about him singing here, just like Hope does in "De-Lovely"

And what's the lesson Mooney is trying to impart to Billy? Just to chill, to take life as it comes, to be more Zen. Again, what a funny lesson to come from this mediocre gangster who's nervous as a cat. The whole number is a big meta goof.

"Take Me Back to Manhattan," as good a song as it is, doesn't need to be here. They sing the same verse two and a half times, and it gives us virtually no information beyond that these New Yorkers would rather be in New York, instead of docking in London. On the other hand, it does sort of connect to the two interlocking love triangles -- Hope has to choose between Evelyn (London) and Billy (New York), and we know Evelyn himself has chosen New York (Reno). In fact, everybody will choose New York... other than Reno, I guess...

Maybe also, "Take Me Back to Manhattan" reminds us that we've been in Shakespeare's woods all night, a place of freedom and magic, but now that everyone is finding their correct partners, they will have to return to the world of the City with their newfound wisdom.

Yes, Anything Goes is very silly and somewhat old-fashioned, but it's also a lot more than that. This is a really well-constructed, satiric farce, and as you can see, these songs are much richer than they might appear.

The adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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The World Has Gone Mad Today

Many of Cole Porter's lyrics are incredibly -- even savagely -- topical. The songs of Anything Goes reference the latest news, gossip, pop culture, and celebrity sightings of 1934, and yet in a way that's fully organic to the characters and story. There's no question Reno Sweeney and Billy Crocker would be making jokes about this stuff.

From our vantage point today, close to a century later, we're apt to miss some of that wicked social satire, because so many of the original references are now obscure to us. So subsequent revivals have tinkered a lot with the lyrics to "You're the Top" and "Anything Goes," in particular, worried that contemporary audiences won't get all the original references (they won't), and as a result, exploring these lyrics sometimes requires a lot of digging.

But this kind of research is so much fun.

This show brilliantly captures some of America's craziest cultural impulses, most of which are very little different today from what they were in 1934. Anything Goes wasn't really telling a love story; it was telling the story of America awkwardly struggling with the huge social and technological changes that were transforming our nation from a rural culture to an urban one, and consequently a more diverse and socially liberal one; and from a social-status culture to one based on economic status.

Though it was surely unintentional, I could argue that [Spoiler Alert] Reno marrying Evelyn is a clear metaphor for the way, for the first time in the 20s and 30s, Americans routinely combined "low culture" and "high culture." In fact that mashup essentially defines American musical comedy.

Today, some frightened conservatives long to return to a mythical, nonexistent 1950s that's whiter, more Christian, and less complicated; and so too did folks in the 1930s fear the massive changes reshaping America. This show, its title, and its title song are all about that.

Every version of the show starts the title song the same way.

Times have changed,
And we've often rewound the clock,
Since the Puritans got a shock,
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today,
Any shock they should try to stem,
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.

It's a double joke, built on the two meanings of land, and comically comparing the relative shocks of finding the New World, versus those same 17th-century pilgrims finding the wild nightlife of 1934 New York. Kinda sounds like a Bill & Ted sequel.

There's actually a lot going on here. The times do change and when they do, some people fear that change, and they react by trying to turn us back to an earlier era ("we've often rewound the clock"), a time perceived to be more innocent, more faithful, more moral. With Ronald Reagan and some of the conservative movement today, the 1960s so freaked them out, that ever since then they've been trying to turn American back to the 1950s. The same thing happened in the 1920s and 30s.

It's telling that Porter invokes the Puritans -- the symbol of social ultra-conservatism -- as a comic measure of the wild times we find ourselves in "now." No, the Puritan's likely would not have been big fans of speakeasies or The Ziegfeld Follies...

As the first verse of the song begins, we set up this comparison. Once upon a time, so long ago that the days are not just old, but "olden," America was really moral. Except that the use of the archaic "olden" (Porter originally used "former" in that spot), and the extremity of just a "glimpse" being shocking, gives the whole thing a layer of smartass irony. Who'd want to live in "olden days"...?

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes.

Women's modesty was a big issue as skirts got shorter, arms got bared, and dresses got more form-fitting. The androgynous, body-disguising, chest-flattening fashions of the 20s were gone. Throughout history, there's always been this weird impulse to hide women's bodies for fear men can't control their sexual urges (this is what the final scene of Grease is about). It's only now that we're concluding it's the men who need to control themselves.

I think we've become numb to the title phrase of this song. It's just too ubiquitous, too embedded in our culture. But think about that phrase -- anything goes, anything is okay, nothing is off limits, there are no rules, no norms, no constraints anymore.

Good authors too, who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose,
Anything Goes.

What was Porter talking about here?

James Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece Ulysses, was banned in England till 1930, and the United States Post Office reportedly burned any copies of the book they found. Finally, in 1933 (a year before Anything Goes opened), the case of Ulysses was re-opened, and the Supreme Court ruled that because the book was not "pornographic" it could not be banned or censored.

D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterly's Lover, about an aristocratic lady who has a sexual affair with her groundskeeper was also banned over its frank discussion of sex (and the importance of orgasm), and its frequent use of the words fuck and cunt. One U.S. Senator exclaimed, “I’ve not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!”

Erskine Caldwell's 1933 novel God's Little Acre was about a dysfunctional farming family in Georgia obsessed with sex and wealth. The novel's sexual themes were so controversial that the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice asked a New York state court to censor it.

In 1934, Henry Miller's semi-autobiographical novel of his sexual escapades in Paris, Tropic of Cancer, with its frequent use of the word cunt, was banned in the United States shortly after its first publication in France. The ACLU tried to sue the U.S. government, but lost its case. Finally, when the novel was published in 1961, sixty obscenity cases were brought in twenty-one different states. Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno wrote that Cancer is "not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” Porter wasn't kidding about four-letter words. This really was a sea change in popular literature.

"Anything Goes" has three bridges, each with a different purpose. The first lists examples of "immoral" acts which lead, in the second bridge, to a general moral chaos, which leads, in the third bridge, to how crazy that chaos makes us all. It's an ironic jab at all the experts of the time warning about the dangers of Modernity.

The song's first bridge lists a bunch of morally sketchy things that "you" (so interesting to put this in the second person!) might enjoy if you live a Fast Life, things which will no longer be off limits in our topsy-turvy culture...

If driving fast cars you like,
If low bars you like,
If old hymns you like,
If bare limbs you like,
If Mae West you like
Or me undressed you like,
Why, nobody will oppose.

When every night,
The set that's smart is
Intruding
In nudist parties
In studios,
Anything Goes.

Before we get to the content, let's look at the craft here. The bridge has seven lines and five of them start with "if," and six of them end with "you like" -- and in between an AABBCC rhyme scheme. That's some really skillful writing. Then we return to the verse, and of those six lines, three start with "in," and those same three lines all have an "-ood" in the middle of the line. But also "smart is" makes a kind of subliminal rhyme with "parties," and to top it all off, the last line of the bridge rhymes with the last two lines of the verse that follows it.

In terms of content, much of this lyric references current events. In 1930, twelve states still did not have any speed limits; it was an automobile wild west.

The "low bars" (i.e., speakeasies) of Prohibition were disappearing by the time Anything Goes opened, a year after the repeal of Prohibition. The reference is a joke on the two meanings of the word low. Here the word means disreputable, but also, literally lower in height. According to a 1946 Life magazine article, before Prohibition, bars were 46-47 inches high, but during and after Prohibition, so many more women were drinking that they lowered many bars to 43 inches.

The "old hymns" reference may be a joke about how many hymns were set to the music of drinking songs because those tunes were already popular. Why else would liking old hymns be subversive like the rest of the items in this list? Maybe the joke here is just that "you" like drinking in taverns, where they sing old hymns that have been converted into drinking songs.

Of course, "bare limbs" were still pretty new in women's fashion and still considered shocking by some. Mae West was still a new movie star in 1934, but she already had been writing plays, starring in them, and getting arrested for her plays' "obscenity." After the Hollywood Production Code was established in 1933, West simply perfected the double entente, with famous lines like "When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better."

Nudism / naturism spread throughout Europe in the 1920s and got to America in the 1930s, due in part to sociologist, political theorist, and liberal social critic Maurice Parmelee’s 1931 book Nudism in Modern Life. Also, "the set that's smart" refers to the phrase "The Smart Set," meaning the cultural elite, usually fashionable and wealthy. It was also the title of a literary magazine that published from 1900-1930.

The song's second bridge is more general than the first, more a catalog of the fallout. Here, the world is just fucked up, backwards, upside-down, disorienting...

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
And that gent today
You gave a cent today
Once had several chateaus.

When folks who still can ride in jitneys
Find out Vanderbilts and Whitneys
Lack baby clo'es,
Anything goes.

No revival has used those last four lines because no one would understand them today. Jitneys were independent taxi cabs or small buses, so the joke is that the middle-class folks who can still afford to take a cab, here in the middle of the Depression, would be shocked to find out that some of the richest Americans (in this case, the Vanderbilt and Whitney families) had lost nearly everything -- due to the creation of income and estate taxes not too long before, the effects of the Depression, and the weirdly profligate spending of the Vanderbilts and others. The "baby clothes" might refer to Gloria Vanderbuilt, who was a child at the time. The Whitneys went broke through corruption.

The third bridge of "Anything Goes" returns to the second person -- you -- acknowledging everybody's feeling that the world has gone crazy and it's making us all crazy. Much like right now. And notice this very early critique of the mainstream media...

Just think of those shocks you've got
And those knocks you've got
And those blues you've got
From the news you've got,
And those pains you've got
(If any brains you've got)
From those little radios.

According to the PBS website:

For the radio, the 1930s was a golden age. At the start of the decade 12 million American households owned a radio, and by 1939 this total had exploded to more than 28 million. But why was this ‘talking telegram’ so popular?

As technology improved radios became smaller and cheaper [hence the "little" radios]. They became the central piece of furniture in the average family’s living room, with parents and children alike, crowding around the set to hear the latest installment of their favorite show.

News broadcasts also influenced the way the public experienced current affairs. When the Hindenburg airship exploded in 1937, reporter Herb Morrison was on the scene, recording the events to be broadcast the following day. But above all the radio provided a way to communicate like never before. Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats’ helped the population feel closer to their president than ever.

There's yet another bridge section, with an early lyric that was not used in 1934 but restored for the 1987 revival:

If saying your pray'rs you like,
If green pears you like,
If old chairs you like,
If backstairs you like,
If love affairs you like
With young bears you like,
Why nobody will oppose.

And yes, "young bears" meant then what it means now; it's a gay reference that a fair number of New York theatre-goers, "the smart set," probably had heard. "Backstairs" was surely a reference to brothels or speakeasies. But what of these other lines? Though several of these references seem oddly random, two of my friends, Mark Cummings and Michael Dale, suggest that the whole stanza is about acceptance of varying sexual tastes, and I think they're right. After all, anything goes. We know Porter loved to joke in code...

If saying your pray'rs you like = Good Girls
If green pears you like = Young Girls, Virgins
If old chairs you like = Older Women
If backstairs you like = Hookers (or Servants?)
If love affairs you like
With young bears you like = Young Men
Why nobody will oppose.

In other words, Free Love. That does make a certain Porter-esque sense, both in terms of his writing and his biography. With that in mind, this sure does feel like Cole's quirky take on "chacun à son goût." And if we're right about this, that may explain why it was cut in 1934...

This last version of the bridge was written by P.G. Wodehouse for the first London production, and it's been used in all the revivals, because so much of the original 1934 lyric is unusable today.

When grandmama whose age is eighty
In night clubs is getting matey
With gigolos,
Anything Goes.
When mothers pack and leave poor father
Because they decide they'd rather
Be tennis pros,
Anything Goes.

That's a fun little joke about married women running off to be lesbians, but this lyric is way too British for this show and these characters. Americans don't use the word "matey" because we don't use "mate" to mean friend; and most Americans don't say, "grandmama." Also in America, "father" and "rather" do not rhyme. And Porter rarely inverted sentences as awkwardly as these first two lines. Still, this stanza does get at another cultural phenomenon of the 1930s.

While the trend up to that point had been for the divorce rate to increase, that got interrupted in the early 1930s. Due to the Depression, many couples stayed together because they couldn't afford divorce. It wasn't until the unemployment rate went down that the increasing divorce rate trend continued. Unemployment was at its highest in 1933, and as the unemployment rate declined throughout the 30s, the divorce rate increased. At the same time, women's tennis greatly increased in popularity. While Cole may be suggesting a connection -- a lesbian joke? -- I am not.

This cheat rhyme was written for the Act I finale of the 1962 revival:

They think he's gangster number one,
So they've made him their favorite son,
And that goes to show.
Anything Goes!
Anything, Anything, Anything Goes!

But "show" doesn't rhyme with "goes"! A different alternate Porter lyric I found corrects the bad rhyme with "And that plot twist shows..." Like I said, there is no single definitive version of this show or most of its songs.

Much of the original 1934 lyric for "Anything Goes" would just baffle today's audiences, with references to Mrs. Ned McLean (a socialite who was the last private owner of the Hope Diamond), Eleanor Roosevelt's radio broadcasts sponsored by Simmons mattresses, extravagant Broadway producer Max Gordon, movie studio head Sam Goldwyn, Ukrainian movie star Anna Sten, actor and socialite Lady Mendl, and others.

When Anything Goes first opened, the title song worked because it reinforced a feeling the audience already had -- that the world is spinning madly out of control, and that sometimes that can be fun. (Or as Little Red might put it, "excited and scared.") As proof of the show's thesis, the songs "Anything Goes" and "You're the Top" (the latter mocking our love affair with celebrities and brand names), offer up example after example ripped from the headlines (and society pages) of 1934. Today when we see Anything Goes, all those examples suggest the craziness in 2018, without literally referencing any of it. But it still works. Crazy is crazy.

In 1934, Americans were grappling with the massive, disorienting changes our country was going through. It did feel to many American as if all the rules had been ripped up, that literally anything goes. Today in 2018, we're grappling with much the same thing, here in the early days of the Digital Age, at the start of huge demographic and social changes in America, when the very nature of truth is up for debate. Life today is just as crazy as it was in Reno Sweeney's America, maybe crazier. Today, all these references may serve only as metaphors, but still pretty potent ones.

I've been telling people that the reason "the bad boy of musical theatre" decided to produce Anything Goes is that it's built on two central themes that fit our kind of work perfectly -- the American habit of making religion into show business and criminals into celebrities. But now, after taking such a deep dive into the title song, I realize those two themes are just the results of the show's true central premise, which is literally "anything goes" -- the world is upside-down.

Every element of this story is testament to this one idea. All the couples are wrongly coupled at first, the clergyman gets arrested and the gangster gets a cruise, the passengers deify a fake murderer, the real gangster is as nervous as a fucking cat, the worldly-wise speakeasy hostess falls for the dorky Englishman... Everything is up for grabs. None of the rules apply. We're in Shakespeare's woods.

And anything goes!

Now, the next time somebody tells you Anything Goes is just silly and mindless, I give you permission to tell them to shut the fuck up.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

I've Been a Sinner, I've Been a Scamp

A lot of musical theatre fans love Anything Goes, but consider it a guilty pleasure, the artsy equivalent of Mississippi mud cake, just a mindless, old-fashioned musical comedy confection. They register great surprise when I describe it as a sharp satire.

But it is.

Musical comedy had dealt in gentle social satire since the beginning, but Anything Goes was the first successful Broadway musical comedy to build its story on two parallel threads of fierce, pointed satire. This time the plot came out of the satirical agenda, rather than the satire being just a fun side joke.

I've written a lot about the neo musical comedy, which emerged in the 1990s as one of the dominant musical theatre forms. A neo musical comedy involves the devices and conventions -- and usually the full-out joy -- of old-fashioned musical comedy, but with a more socio-political, more ironic, and often more subversive point of view. Think of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bat Boy, Urinetown, Heathers, Something Rotten, The Scottsboro Boys, Cry-Baby; but there were a few examples even earlier, like Little Shop of Horrors in 1982, The Cradle Will Rock in 1937, and really, The Threepenny Opera in 1928.

And arguably, Anything Goes in 1934. Anything Goes was a dead-on satirical chronicle of That Moment... which also happen to be This Moment.

Maybe we're just too used to Anything Goes at this point, to see it as it once was. But this is a show that includes a mock religious hymn to a (supposed) murderer, skeet shooting with a machine gun, a love song that mentions snorting coke, and a parody religious revival meeting featuring a song with a slyly sexual hook line. If you doubt the double entendre of "Blow Gabriel, Blow," this is the same songwriter who wrote in the title song, "If love affairs you like with young bears you like..." That meant then what it means today. And notice in the scene leading up to the song, most of the confessions are sexual. Reno is presented as an explicitly sexual presence from the beginning, so her spot as lead singer / evangelist, and with her randy angels as back-up, it's hard not to read the song as sexual double entendre.

In comic counterpoint to that, the language of the "Blow, Gabriel" lyric is Religious Symbolism as a Second Language. This is an amateur, or more to the point, a religious outsider, leading this revival meeting -- with the help of the fake-minister "Dr. Moon." It's obvious neither of them are really believers, and that doesn't seem to bother the crowd a bit.

And by the way, why do we want Gabriel to blow his horn? The Bible says that "an archangel with the trumpet of God" will announce the Second Coming, and people have assumed that's Gabriel, particularly since Milton made that connection in Paradise Lost.

During the Depression, many American believed that they were living through the "great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be." (Matthew 24:21) So riffing on that, Reno and her angels (I think we're supposed to assume this is one of their regular numbers) pray for the archangel to signal the end of the tribulations (Prohibition, the Depression) and announce with his trumpet the coming of Christ. Reno assures Gabriel she's ready to "trim [her] lamp," a Bible metaphor meaning she'll work at and maintain her faith (to keep oil lamps burning brightly and consistently, you have to trim the wick back), that she's mended her ways (we can only guess what those ways included), that now, "I'm good by day and I'm good by night." Of course, that line assumes that Reno hasn't always been "good by night."

But these "sinners" aren't asking for forgiveness or anything; they just want to "play all day in the Promised Land." It's a remarkably crass take on the Book of Revelation's thousand years of peace and righteousness. And all this to jazz music, until recently considered the devil's music...

In one section, they all chant:

Satan, you stay away from me,
'Cause you ain't the man I wanna see!
I'm gonna be good as the day I was born,
'Cause I heard that man with the horn!
Do ya hear it?

Once you really pay attention to this lyric, you realize this section is all about the End Times. They want to be good, because Jesus and Judgment Day are coming soon!

One of the more subtle jokes in the show is in this song, when the women take the melody and the men sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in counterpart, also a song about angels taking "me" to heaven. Since this is the male passengers and crew singing this counter-melody, are we to read that as spontaneous, that religious fervor is taking them over? Since this is always a big, involved, full-company, Broadway musical comedy dance number, it lays on top of our fake revival meeting an even more cynical layer of comment -- religion really is show business.

But there's even more swimming around in Anything Goes. When the show opened in late 1934, Prohibition had ended just a year earlier, but the Depression rolled on, and the Dust Bowl kept destroying lives. The FBI was at the height of its notoriety, but the public loved some of the gangsters on the FBI's Most Wanted list (which is the whole point of "Public Enemy Number One"). Importantly, the FBI -- standing in for law and order in general -- is not on board the S.S. American. In fact, they arrest the wrong guy at the beginning of the show, and leave the ship! They're not up to the job. They can't/won't protect us. Was this a comment on how hard it was for law enforcement to catch America's celebrity criminals, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie & Clyde, et al.?

On the other hand, we find out early in the show that the FBI has caught Snake Eyes Johnson, which is in tune with the fact that every celebrity criminal I just mentioned was shot and killed in 1934, just before Anything Goes opened.

Here on the S.S. American, we are in Shakespeare's metaphorical woods, away from laws and civilization, where two things will happen. First, love will get "fixed" as our characters de-couple from the wrong partners and re-couple with the right partners. Second, with lots of liquor and very little "law," these passengers are free to act on their impulses, to chase after various forms of vice, to be their "natural" selves. And notice that the ship is called the "American" -- this place of no rules and no law is 1930s America, where (until a year earlier) lots of Americans broke the law by drinking alcohol. When that many Americans broke the law, when they stopped believing in the institutions that failed them, America became functionally lawless.

By calling the ship the S.S. American, the show's writers were underlining their social commentary. As a comic microcosm of our country, these passengers showcase the worst of the American inclination to make celebrities out of criminals and show biz out of religion, an inclination as prevalent today as it was in the thirties.

But the satiric aim is more pointed than just those two overarching themes. So what else does Anything Goes satirize? A lot.

Even though economists will tell you the 1929 stock market crash did not "cause" the Depression, it was still the starting pistol, and most people in 1934 believed rich Wall Street types were to blame. Notice that in Anything Goes we have two representatives of Wall Street -- the drunken, horny, nearly blind Mr. Whitney, and the shit-disturbing rogue Billy Crocker.

The name Crocker comes from the French for "heartbreak." In this story Wall Street is decidedly undependable.

Richard Whitney had been the very famous president of the New York Stock Exchange and during the 1930s, he was famed for steering his clients through the treacherous waters of the Depression. But his success was a scam of the proportions of Enron and Bernie Madoff, and he was finally caught in 1938 when his firm collapsed. Still, as audiences watched Anything Goes in 1934, Whitney was the hero of the rich, so naming Billy's boss Whitney -- and making him a drunk -- was a pretty subversive reference. According to Wikipedia:

On October 24, 1929, Black Thursday, Whitney attempted to avert the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Alarmed by rapidly falling stock prices, several leading Wall Street bankers met to find a solution to the panic and chaos on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The meeting included Thomas W. Lamont, acting head of Morgan Bank; Albert Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank; and Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New York. They chose Whitney, then vice president of the Exchange, to act on their behalf.

 With the bankers' financial resources behind him, Whitney went onto the floor of the Exchange and ostentatiously placed a bid to purchase a large block of shares in U.S. Steel at a price well above the current market. As traders watched, Whitney then placed similar bids on other "blue chip" stocks. This tactic was similar to a tactic that had ended the Panic of 1907, and succeeded in halting the slide that day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average recovered with a slight increase, closing with it down only 6.38 points for that day. In this case, however, the respite was only temporary; stocks subsequently collapsed catastrophically on Black Tuesday, October 29. Whitney's actions gained him the sobriquet, "White Knight of Wall Street."

It is a little weird that Mr. Whitney's first name is Elijah, coincidentally (?) named after the nineteenth-century inventor and arms manufacturer...

The Harcourts (and Mrs. Wentworth, in the '34 version) stand in for America's "cafe society," the 1% of 1934. In the original version of the show, the Harcourts' family business was in serious trouble and needed saving, which was the reason for the arranged marriage. Is it any wonder Billy and Hope both would like to escape this culture? According to an article on the PBS website:

The Great Depression was partly caused by the great inequality between the rich who accounted for a third of all wealth and the poor who had no savings at all. As the economy worsened many lost their fortunes, and some members of high society were forced to curb their extravagant lifestyles.

But for others the Depression was simply an inconvenience especially in New York where the city’s glamorous venues – places to see and be seen – such as El Morocco and The Stork Club were heaving with celebrities, socialites and aristocrats.

For the vast majority the 1930s was a time of misery. But for many American dynastic families, parties helped to escape the reality on the street and the grander the better.

Parties and trans-Atlantic cruises.

Many stories of the Great Depression show us the shattered and disenfranchised turning to religion in their time of need. But church attendance grew during the Depression only about five percent. Notably, no one aboard the S.S. American in Anything Goes has that spiritual need, and so for these people religion becomes show business, entertainment, the latest fad. Though the content of "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" is basically reverent, the song's rowdy, fast, jazz music quickly and comically short-circuits any hint of real religion fervor. This is religion as party.

The only genuine symbol of religion we see in the show is the comically clueless Bishop Dobson, who's banished from this community (i.e.,mistakenly arrested) before the ship even sets sail; and all we're left with is the fake religion of fake-minister "Dr." Moon, and the gambling "Christian converts." Genuine religion (and conventional morality), the Baptist tent revivals and religious radio shows of the 1930s, are all missing from this place. Here there is no moral control -- it's Shakespeare's woods.

In the 1930s, the 1960s, and also today, Dark Times bring forth the most pointed satire. Anything Goes opened halfway through the Depression, which also begat brilliant satires like Of Thee I Sing, Let 'Em Eat Cake, and The Cradle Will Rock.. The 1962 revival opened at the start of one of the most divided, angry decades in American history. The 1987 revival opened on the infamous Black Monday, the day the stock market crashed again.

None of the show's targets feel dated, because we're struggling with all the same things now. Still today, religion is often repackaged as slick, high-budget show biz. When America's evangelicals strongly support the womanizing vulgarian and sexual predator Donald Trump, religion in America is on life support. And still today, we make celebrities out of criminals, and depending where the various investigations lead, Trump may be the best illustration of that too.

Cole Porter's songs have all the bite, the sophistication, and the smartass humor of Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg, but Porter's songs often bite a little harder, his lyrics closer to how people talk, instead of always just building toward a funny rhyme. Like those of the great George M. Cohan, Porter's lyrics sound like they could actually come out of the mouths of the characters. If his songs can often be transplanted from one show to another, that's only because many of his shows were about the same kind of people -- smartass, subversive, sexual, clever, ironic, complicated, and contradictory.

Just think for a second about all the characters in Anything Goes that have contradictory impulses.

Porter wrote both in contemporary slang and in genuinely elevated, powerfully poetic language when the moment called for it. His songs can be emotionally shattering and they can be icily cynical, about the most intimate insecurities or the most macro satire. Porter and his co-writers were writing old-school musical comedy, but they were also chronicling our times -- then and now -- most insightfully. It's so much fun working on this rich, crazy material.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

The Tinpantithesis

People like me -- let's be gentle and just call us "the purists" -- really like to have "definitive" texts for all the great musicals. Often that is represented by the first production, but not always. Shows like The Music Man, Gypsy, Oklahoma!, West Side Story, and Fiddler on the Roof pretty much have their scripts and scores etched in stone. You don't fiddle with them.

For other shows, like Show Boat, Cabaret, Hair, Pippin, and Anything Goes, there is no single definitive version. These shows have changed so much and so often, in foreign productions, tours, and revivals -- even during their original runs -- that you can't really point to one version of any of these shows as canonical. I would argue strenuously for the original Broadway productions of Cabaret, Grease, and Pippin, but the shows' authors would disagree with me. I would love to brand Ziegfeld's original 1927 production of Show Boat as definitive, but there are many changes I like in the revivals, especially Hal Prince's fairly radical 1994 revival.

It all reminds me of the game Exquisite Corpse (for which a song in Hedwig is named). According to Wikipedia:

also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original French term cadavre exquis), is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.

The historian-analysis-geek in me would love to call the 1934 Anything Goes the "real" version, but I've read that script... it's seriously flawed. From 1900 to about 1940, many Broadway musicals had much stronger scores than scripts, which is why so many of those shows are unrevivable.

The substantially rewritten 1962 off Broadway revival is much better theatre. The 1987 revival is a bit closer to the original, but still heavily revised, including several of the changes from 1962. In 2011, the latest revival was pretty close to the '87 version.

And don't even get me started on the TV and movie versions.

We're doing the 1962 version, which I've found most theatre people think is the best of the of Anything Goes's. Because of all the versions, it's fun to look at this Frankenstein song list...

The first song in the '62 version, "You're the Top," is in the original 1934 Anything Goes score, and set up pretty much the same way, but it's late in Act I, right before the finale. And "Bon Voyage" is in pretty much the same spot in every production (although the '87 revival added its counterpoint song, "There's No Cure Like Travel," which had been cut in '34)

Our version quotes instrumentally the sailor's chantey, "There Will Always Be a Lady Fair," but does not include the vocals from 1934 (and '87). The '87 production also stuck in "I Like to Row on the Crew," one of Porter's college songs from Yale.

But where the '62 version has "It's De-Lovely," with Billy and Hope on deck, the original version has them singing "All Through the Night." Though the two songs sort of accomplish the same thing, the tone couldn't be more different. Replacing the serious, aching emotion of "All Through the Night" with the smartass playfulness of "De-Lovely" is an interesting move. "It's De-Lovely" is actually from Porter's 1936 show Red, Hot, and Blue, featuring Ethel Merman as a hard-boiled manicurist (not kidding) named "Nails" O'Reilly Duquesne, singing to her square lawyer boyfriend Bob, played by Bob Hope. It was first written but not used, for the 1936 film Born to Dance.

It's interesting in the transfer from one show to the other, how the smartass, streetwise woman becomes the smartass, streetwise guy (Billy); and the innocent, "square" guy becomes the innocent, "square" woman (Hope).

Where the '62 version has Bonnie and the angels singing, "Heaven Hop," in 1934 the song "Where are the Men?" was in that spot originally. "Heaven Hop" is actually from the 1928 Porter show Paris. It's a more interesting song here, if for no other reason, the crazy mashing up of religion and pop culture in the lyric, perfect for Reno's Angels. No other versions of the show used this song.

"Friendship" is originally from the 1939 musical DuBarry Was a Lady. The original Anything Goes script has "You're the Top" in this spot, with only Reno and Billy. In '62, Reno, Moonie, and Billy sing "Friendhip;" in the later revivals, only Reno and Moonie sing it.

The '62 version then moves "I Get a Kick Out of You," from the beginning of the show to late Act I, Originally, Reno was singing about being in love with Billy; but in the '62 version, she's singing about being in love with Sir Evelyn. That's much more interesting and much more plot-driven. Porter first wrote this song for the 1931 musical Star Dust, which never even went into rehearsal. Most of that score is lost, but this song made it into Anything Goes.

Every version ends the first act with "Anything Goes," but the original also added a short dialogue scene after the song in which Hope walks out on Billy (which happens before the song in our version), and a short reprise of "You're the Top."

Both the original and the '62 version start Act II with "Public Enemy Number One," although the original is much longer.

"Let's Step Out" was added halfway through the original run of Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen, under the title, "Stepping Out." I don't know if the title phrase was changed as well as the title... There's really no reason for this song here -- contrary to the common misconception of 30s musical theatre, the rest of the songs (including the interpolated ones) do connect to the plot and speak in the voices of these characters. But this one...

I'm guessing this was just an attempt to juice the energy early in the second act. In the original, the audience had to wait fourteen pages to get to the second song of Act II. In the '62 version, there are two songs in that gap. The other is "Let's Misbehave," one of Porter's real gems, which was also written for the 1928 musical Paris, but cut before opening. The song was sung by two characters who are actors, Vivienne Rolland and Guy Pennel, who've been working together but only now realize they are in love.

But then Porter wrote his huge hit, "Let's Do It," and that replaced "Let's Misbehave," which then sat in a trunk till it was rescued in 1962.

"All Through the Night" in the '62 version is essentially where a reprise of "All Through the Night" was in 1934. In '34, it was followed by "Be Like the Bluebird"; in '62 it was preceded by "Be Like the Bluebird."

Billy and Hope both sing “All Through the Night,” but almost entirely separate, not together; their union is not real yet, it’s in the future, so they can’t musically “couple” by harmonizing yet. Then again, they do sing the last two lines together (in octaves), so there’s still hope for them. In the original 1934 production, neither of them sang the last verse, which went to the men’s chorus. The song’s harmonic progression is fascinating, winding its way through various tonalities, until the home key is almost lost – like Billy and Hope’s love. And almost the entire melody is in half-steps, slowly descending chromatically, working against the /dreamy lyric, until the end of the main phrase suddenly leaps up with optimism. It’s a beautiful sound picture.

The '62 revival really did fix some problem with pacing and narrative structure. In the original, we then took a break for Reno to sing "Buddie Beware," and Hope to sing "The Gypsy in Me." But in the '87 revival, they gave "Buddie Beware" to Bonnie (renamed Erma), and gave "The Gypsy in Me" to Sir Evelyn.

In the '62 version, this spot goes to Reno and the Angels for "Take Me Back to Manhattan," which is really from The New Yorkers (1930), Porter's very adult musical satire about a rich woman who falls in love with a bootlegger. "Take Me Back to Manhattan" was that show's full company finale.

Most of the versions of Anything Goes end with a short medley of "You're the Top" and "Anything Goes," though the 1934 script just has a stage direction saying they reprise "Anything Goes."

As you can see from that tour through the score, the '62 revival version didn't just add a bunch of Porter songs, it also cut four songs from the original: "There Will Always Be a Lady Fair," "Where Are the Men?", "Buddie Beware," and "The Gypsy in Me." The 1987 revival put these last two back in, along with a song cut from the original, "Easy to Love," which was too rangy for the original Billy. The later revivals also added Porter's "Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye,"first written for the movie Born to Dance but cut, then added and cut again from Red, Hot, and Blue, finally landing as the only song in Terrence Rattigan's London play, O Mistress Mine.

Now... take a look back over this post and the many songs mentioned, all of them really great. That man could crank out amazing music and lyrics like nobody else I can think of. He would write dozens of songs for every show, knowing that two-thirds of them would be discarded.

I once had an exercise in a musical theatre class in college. The prof gave us a piece of sheet music with no lyrics. We had to write a new lyric to this existing music. Even for someone like me who writes musicals, this was a cool exercise, something I usually don't have to do. It turned out the music was some unknown "cut" Cole Porter song. (My lyric was called, "Ethel, Go Away.") Porter wrote so much. And so much of it is amazing.

He was as prolific as the Tin Pan Alley writers, but went beyond them in terms of originality and artistry -- and sexuality. None of them could have written the epic, sprawling "Begin the Beguine," or lyrics as culturally insightful and acrobatic as "You're the Top." Irving Berlin was a great songwriter, but he didn't write more than a small handful of great theatre songs. Porter wrote a shit-ton.

The purist in me fights with the fanboy over Anything Goes because I love this patched together score so deeply. Even the lighter weight songs are so clever, so ironic, so subversive.

We New Liners will return to the spirit of the original production, but not the original script and score, which honestly aren't as strong as what came after.

Maybe the reason Anything Goes has stayed so popular so long is the rehab done on it off Broadway in 1962, when they sort of made the perfect Cole Porter musical.

And who am I to argue with that?

Rehearsals start next week!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here

ANYTHING GOES!

Why is "the bad boy of musical theatre" producing the 1934 musical comedy Anything Goes, a show everybody does? What are they gonna do to it?

That's what I keep hearing.

Well, we're not going to do anything "to it," other than what we always do, take the show back to its roots, back to its creators' intentions, to let it be again the very pointed, very adult satire it once was.

Also, could a show title ever describe our company better?

My freshman year in high school, Anything Goes (the 1962 version) was the first "real" musical (i.e., a musical that had been on Broadway and not just written for school kids) that I had ever been in. I played Bishop Dobson (who's arrested in the first scene) and I was also in the tap chorus! I fell in love with the show, and all the songs. I knew it was an "old" show, but it didn't seem old-fashioned to me. It was sexual and cynical, and kind of wild and anarchic, and blazingly self-aware.

I now know it was very much in the vein of George M. Cohan's earliest musical comedies in the early 1900s, but more cynical, a little edgier.

Fast-forward to 2006, and I was writing a musical theatre history book, Strike Up the Band, and as I wrote about Anything Goes, I started to realize things I had never thought of before. Maybe it was because when I first got to know the show, I hadn't yet developed analytical skills, so I hadn't really looked beyond the surface. But now writing about the show, I realized there are two central themes running through the story, two delicious pieces of social satire that are just as relevant today as they were in 1934.

We still turn religion into show business -- and we've gotten so much better at it! And we still turn criminals into celebrities. Anything Goes is a New Line show.

I also had learned that Reno was based on two real-life people, the famous speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan (also the model for Velma Kelly in Chicago), and to a lesser extent, the first superstar evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I just recently learned that, at one point, Texas Guinan pondered becoming an evangelist.

Notice the similarity in the names Texas Guinan and Reno Sweeney: two two-syllable names, and the first is a place name. Also, Reno, Nevada, legalized open gambling in 1931.

I also learned from an actor who was playing Moonface and had done lots of research on the show, that Victor Moore originally played Moonie very mousy, unassuming, jittery, with a high, nasally voice, and none of the Brooklyn accent we're used to from more recent productions. He was opposite every cliche about gangsters -- which was the joke. He was fundamentally, constitutionally ill-suited to being a gangster. That immediately struck me as much funnier than the usual characterization. I think Joel Grey in the latest revival came closer to that idea.

For some reason, now when I think of Moonie, I think of John Waters...

Also, it's important to me that Sir Evelyn is not gay, which is the usual default for unimaginative actors. But suggesting he's gay short-circuits a big part of the intricate plot. It's much funnier if he's obviously straight -- and terribly charming. After all, we have to believe that hard-boiled Reno falls for him.

It occurs to me that Reno and Evelyn are sort of Harold Hill and Marion, but with the genders reversed...

Since 2006, I've been telling people that one day New Line will do Anything Goes, and often I would then share with them my revelations about the show. In order for us to produce the show, I had to whittle the cast down to 16 at the most. So I actually sat down and figured that out three years ago. Just so I knew it could be done. Last year, once Dowdy and I started talking about actually producing it, I made some other decisions.

First, I don't want it to be a "tap show" -- I want it to be a smart, insightful comedy. After all, there were other kinds of dancing in the 1930s. There will be some tap, because I don't like frustrating audience's expectations without a good reason, but not a ton. Our angels will tap, and I'm told that our Mrs. Harcourt can tap too...

Also, pacing is everything. The performance style of musical comedy in 1934 wasn't far removed from vaudeville, very full front (no mics!), with only the slightest wisp of a Fourth Wall. This should be a big, crazy, nonstop, high-energy, perpetual motion machine, something closer to a Marx Brothers movie crossed with New Line's own fearless, high-voltage style. It should leave the audience and actors breathless.

And on that topic, I'll quote from our website:

Like the Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles, Joan Littlewood’s company in London, and the Steppenwolf in Chicago, New Line has developed its own style of performance, its own personality – very aggressive, very intimate, outrageous but serious-minded, and anchored by a phrase coined by the Actors' Gang, “the height of expression, the depth of sincerity.” The canvas is bigger, the colors richer, the brushstrokes more expansive, but the image is no less true, the details no less real, the textures no less subtle. Theatre scholar Tom Oppenheim writes about Stella Adler, in the outstanding book Training of the American Actor, "Stella insisted that characters must be multidimensional and grounded in oneself. They must be real human beings. But she does not shy away from painting characters in broad strokes. While she demands truth, she never shies away from size."

The height of expression, the depth of sincerity -- exaggerated and completely honest at the same time. The more seriously these characters take the stakes, the chaos, the plot twists,. the funnier our show will be. As we've learned from Bat Boy, Urinetown, Spelling Bee, Cry-Baby and Jerry Springer the Opera, there's nothing funnier than Too Serious.

Without changing much at all (other than the size of the cast), I really believe we can reveal things about this show that people don't usually see. And the way we'll do that is to trust the material and follow it where it takes us, whether or not that's where it took others...

We start rehearsals the day after our reading of The Zombies of Penzance. No rest for the wicked. But I can't wait to dive into the insane chaotic glory of Anything Goes.

We are going to have SO MUCH FUN. Click here for tickets!

Scott

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