It’s Dilemma! It’s de Limit! It’s Deluxe! It’s De-Lovely!

This is the introduction for my newest book, Anything, Anything, Anything Goes: A Deep Dive:

My freshman year in high school, Anything Goes (the 1962 version) was the first “real” musical I was ever in. I played Bishop Dobson (who gets arrested in the first scene) and I was also in the tap dancing 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 first musical comedies in the early 1900s, but even more cynical, and a little edgier.

Fast-forward to 2006, and I was writing a musical theatre history book, Strike Up the Band. 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 any analytical skills, so I hadn’t 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. Americans still turn religion into show business, and we still turn criminals into celebrities. Anything Goes is a smart, insightful, razor-sharp cultural satire about Us. Now.

I also learned from an actor who was playing Moonface and had done lots of research on the show, that Victor Moore originally played Mooney very mousy, unassuming, jittery, with a high, nasal voice, and none of the Brooklyn accent we’re used to from more recent productions. Over the years Moonface has become a parody of gangster movies clichés, but Victor Moore played the role as the opposite of every cliché about gangsters – and that was the very funny joke that we seem to miss today. Mooney is fundamentally, constitutionally ill-suited to being a gangster. That’s why he’s only Number 13. That’s automatically funnier than the usual characterization.

And also notice his name, Moonface Martin. His nickname apparently mean he’s ugly or disfigured in some way. That connects to a belief system, “eugenics,” popular at the time, which posited that physical deformity indicates mental deformity. That belief was on full display in Chester Gould’s comic strip Dick Tracy, which had debuted in 1931. In line with the eugenics movement, every one of the criminals in Dick Tracy’s world was grotesquely deformed, and their names described their inside-and-out aberration – Big Boy (a stand-in for Capone), Pruneface (possibly the model for Moonface?), Flattop, Little Face, Mumbles, The Brow, etc.

Also, over time I have come to understand that Sir Evelyn is definitely not gay, which is the usual default for unimaginative actors and directors. Suggesting he’s gay short-circuits a big part of the intricate plot. It’s much funnier if he’s clearly straight, and terribly charming. After all, we have to believe that hard-boiled Reno genuinely falls for him. Reno and Sir Evelyn are roughly parallel to Harold Hill and Marion Paroo, but with the genders reversed.

Maybe my most important lesson was that the show was never meant to be “a tap show.” Dance on Broadway at the time was a wild variety of popular social dancing. And stylistically, the pacing of the show is everything. The performance style of Thirties musical comedy wasn’t far removed from vaudeville, very full front (there were no mics!), with only the slightest wisp (if any) of a Fourth Wall. Anything Goes is a big, crazy, nonstop, high-energy, perpetual motion machine, something much closer to a Marx Brothers movie than to later, mid-century musical comedy. It leaves the audience and actors breathless. And delighted.

It’s worth noting that any American musical from the 1930s brings some baggage with it. Anything Goes of course has the problematic “Chinese converts.” But its parallel baggage is that 1930s musical comedies were all essentially “white” musicals, in which the characters were written to be white, and the plots erase the presence of people of color in American life – except for those “Magical Negro” characters (Paul in Kiss Me, Kate; Jewel in Best Little Whorehouse; Caroline in Caroline, or Change; Leading Player in Pippin; Joice Heth in Barnum; Lola in Kinky Boots; et al.), the exceptions that prove the rule.

That problem is less pervasive today, but it’s not gone. In the book Race in American Musical Theatre, Josephine Lee writes, “Well into the twenty-first century, theatrical success continues to be defined in ways that maintain white perspectives and artistic dominance.” The first definer of the image of the American chorus girl, Florenz Ziegfeld, made her white and interchangeable. In 1922 Ziegfeld debuted his famous tag line for his Follies, “A National Institution – Glorifying the American Girl.” In other words, the American girl is white and interchangeable. Pretty is white. As a case in point, the 1934 production of Anything Goes included Reno’s sixteen angels, all platinum blondes.

Even when one of these shows had a chorus line of black women, for a taste of “exoticism,” they would be the lightest skinned black women the producers could find. The white girl was still the ideal. Some people still argue today that black people never would have been on a transatlantic ocean liner like that in 1934 – both for reasons of race and social status – so it’s not wrong to cast Anything Goes entirely with white performers, as it was originally.

But that’s a simplistic argument.

Anything Goes is storytelling as much as historical document; and no audience expects a history lesson. Doing the show today, there’s no reason why Reno has to be white; or why Hope and Mrs. Harcourt have to be the same race.

Still, we still have to admit that Anything Goes is not really about the lives of people of color – which is why we all should produce new shows as often as “classics.” But I digress.

Even with those caveats, Anything Goes is wonderful in so many ways, a wild musical comedy about anarchy and chaos, where the dizzying action aboard this ocean liner reveals the insanity of the 1930s. Our country felt out of control (as it often does), and so did the S.S. American. And though we don’t like to admit it, Anything Goes is always about America right now – no matter when it’s produced. America is always a mess, our popular culture always swims in the ridiculous, and we are forever weirdly in love with gangster mythology. Anything Goes is a timeless funhouse mirror we can always hold up to ourselves when we need a good hearty laugh.

And those songs!

Alec Wilde wrote in the excellent book American Popular Song about Cole Porter in the mid-1930s, when Anything Goes opened, “By this point in his career Porter was in full control of his musical craft. He was experimenting, doing daring things, and writing in many styles, though this last seems less obvious because of the immediately recognizable style of his lyrics. His musical training constantly reveals itself in both his melodic as well as his harmonic invention.”

I love this show. Here’s why.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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