Hear the Sweet Beat

It was a rough birth, but a great, weird, long life.

In November 1934, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes hit Broadway like a freight train, starring the powerhouse trio of Ethel Merman, William Gaxton, and the hilariously stoic, trembly-voiced comedian Victor Moore. It wasn’t Porter’s first show – he had already written scores for See America First (1916), Within the Quota (1923), Paris (1928), Wake Up and Dream (1929), The New Yorkers (1930), Gay Divorce (1932), and Nymph Errant (1933) – but Anything Goes was his best. So many of the songs would become American standards, and the show’s success and popularity would never really diminish, particularly after the boost from the 1962 off Broadway revival.

Originally, the show was called Hard to Get, then Bon Voyage, written mainly by Guy Bolton, with jokes by P.G. Wodehouse (pronounced WOOD-house), and it told a wacky tale of a trans-Atlantic crossing aboard a luxury liner, a wedding to be stopped, a disgruntled screenwriter concocting wacky disruptions (including a fake bomb), various romantic obstacles, and of course, mismatched lovers. (The first script was not about a shipwreck as some history books claim.)

The first composer that producer Vinton Freedley envisioned for the project was Jerome Kern, but Kern worked only with Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II at that time, and he wasn't interested. Freedley also considered George Gershwin, who was enmeshed in the creation of Porgy and Bess. Next on Freedley’s list was Cole Porter.

But then the real life shipwreck of the Morro Castle, killing 132 people, hit the headlines two days before the show went into rehearsal, and Freedley decided making a musical comedy about a fake bomb on board a luxury liner was no longer a good idea. So Freedley introduced the director, Howard Lindsay, to the columnist and press agent Russell Crouse and asked them to write a new book.

Lindsay and Crouse would go on to become one of the most successful writing teams in the American theatre, writing Life With Father and the scripts for Red, Hot, and Blue, Call Me Madam, and The Sound of Music, among other shows. Their 1945 play State of the Union won the Pulitzer Prize.

So the new bookwriters fashioned a new story around Porter’s now completed score (maybe this is why it's so easy to tinker with), reportedly retaining less than a dozen lines from the earlier version, this time about safer romantic hijinks aboard a luxury liner. The ship setting had to remain since sets were already built. In this new version, the steamship S.S. American (as a proxy for America itself) functions like Shakespeare’s woods, a place with no rules, where people find out who they really are and “correct” the mistakes they’ve made in the world of the City, a "free" place where lovers de-couple and re-couple.

The bad boy hero Billy Crocker was named for a college buddy of Porter’s at Yale, who helped finance some of Porter’s early shows. Moonface Martin, aka Reverend Dr. Moon, was originally named Moon Face Mooney, but during the Boston tryout, an ominous message was personally delivered to the theatre from an eccentric mobster in New Jersey who was not pleased to share his name with a musical comedy character.

Anything Goes ran 420 performances, the fourth longest run of the decade, and 261 performances in London in 1935. The New York Times called it “a thundering good show,” and “hilarious and dynamic entertainment.” The New York World-Telegram called it “a triumph,” and said, “You just must see it.” The Boston Post wrote, “It opened fast, it raced along; in liveliness and beauty, wit and humor, it weaved a spell of genuine enjoyment that far exceeds anything the stage has given us in many a season.”

A film version was made in 1936, initially announced with Bing Crosby as Billy, Queenie Smith as Reno LaGrange (!), and W.C. Fields as Moonface. When it was released, Merman was back in her role, with Crosby as Billy, and Charles Ruggles as Moonie. The film included six of Porter’s songs and six new songs by other writers. A shortened TV version was aired on NBC in 1954 with Merman, Frank Sinatra, and Bert Lahr, with some of the original score and other Porter songs added. A 1956 film version was made that had nothing to do with the show except the title and a few songs.

The show was revived off Broadway in 1962 with a revised script by Guy Bolton, moving the entire story onto the ship (cutting the opening bar scene), as well as cutting some lesser songs and adding several others from other Porter scores. It ran 239 performances. Then it hit London again in 1969 but ran only 15 performances. The show returned to Broadway in 1987 for an impressive 804 performances, and London once more in 1989. The 1987 version sported a new script by John Weidman and Timothy Crouse (son of Lindsay Crouse), based on the original and restoring more of the original score, including some previously cut songs. The show was revived again in London in 2002, directed by Trevor Nunn, and it returned to Broadway in 2011 in a version very close to the 1987 version.

Because of all these different versions of the show, there is no single definitive version. The 1934 script probably couldn't be produced today, and the 1934 score did have some less than brilliant songs. "Waltz Down the Aisle" doesn't even approach the skill of "I Get a Kick Out of You."

So maybe it's better that Anything Goes has changed over time. People today see productions of the '62 revival, and they assume the score was always packed with all those hits, but it wasn't. The show we know today really is superior to the original. I can't imagine this show without "Friendship," "De-Lovely," "Let's Misbehave," or "Take Me Back to Manhattan," but none of those songs were in the show in '34.

I guess maybe a constantly shifting score is exactly right for a show called Anything Goes. We say it's a "classic," but really, it's the revival thirty years later that's the classic. And that's fine. Whatever its circuitous path to our stage, it's still a fierce satire that totally nails some of the crazier impulses in our culture today.

And our culture in the 30s. And in the 60s, and 80s...

We've moved into the theatre, and now we just run this wild, wacky show at every rehearsal. We're having so much fun!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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