Anything Goes

Anything Goes: Dallas Morning News review

‘Anything Goes’ a joyful blast to past with big orchestra and cast

Nancy Churnin

IRVING — Every season, music lures conductor Jay Dias from New York to Lyric Stage in Irving like a pied piper. In the case of Anything Goes, playing through Sunday at Irving Arts Center, it is 33 pipers, or rather musicians, and 37 cast members who give him the opportunity to re-create the original orchestrations composed for the show before it opened on Broadway in 1934.

“I am such a fan of Cole Porter,” Dias says on the phone. “I love having this opportunity to do his work the way he envisioned it, to show the grand musical arc that seamlessly blends popularized, contemporary early 1930s musical styles with his incredibly knowledgeable and detailed classical writing skills.”

What makes this possible is Lyric’s commitment to working with big orchestras and casts, something that goes against the trend of steadily shrinking orchestras that require synthesizers, miking and sound mixing even on Broadway.

It’s one of the two aspects of the unique mission Lyric Stage founding producer Steven Jones created for his theater: the development and the preservation of the American musical.

On the development end, the company has produced 19 world premieres, with two more slated for next season: Quanah, inspired by the story of Comanche chief Quanah Parker, and Pure Country, adapted from the 1992 Warner Bros. movie about a country music star.

To fulfill the restoration mandate for Anything Goes, Dias has become a sleuth, seeking out original scores for the zany story of tangled romance at sea, with Jones securing the rights for Lyric to produce them. The late conductor John McGlinn had found the pre-Broadway scores, complete with three songs that had been cut before opening night, in a warehouse in New Jersey in the 1980s: “Kate the Great,” “What a Joy to Be Young” and “Waltz Down the Aisle.”

Dias located McGlinn’s discoveries in the Library of Congress and spent a year studying them and piecing them together with the original book by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse. To do it as written required a big orchestra willing to add rarely used instruments to their mix, including a bass oboe, ocarinas — an ancient wind instrument used in the sailors’ songs — and the celesta, most commonly associated with Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite.

Jones credits sponsors Ralph and Joy Ellis for the annual funding that makes it possible. The couple made a multiyear pledge to help the theater continue presenting shows with big orchestras after they saw Lyric debut its critically acclaimed popular production of Carousel with 40 musicians in 2007.

Jones likes to watch the audience as the vibrations from the instruments fill and thrill the room. Watching the happiness in Dias’ face as he winks and smiles at his musicians while waving his baton, easily visible in the open pit, adds to the joy.

“It feels right,” Dias says. “It’s just the way it should be with the right sound. It makes me feel grateful that I have in my life such beauty.”

Experiencing Lyric Stage’s recreation of the original 1934 production of Anything Goes is, in a word, bliss. It’s like taking a step back in time in the best way possible, to a world of richly textured, heavenly harmonies exquisitely conducted by Jay Dias, with nary a synthesizer in sight. There isn’t a weak link in the smartly costumed large cast directed and choreographed by Penny Ayn Maas as mixed-up relationships and identities are comically untangled and set right on an ocean voyage with some of the most glorious songs that have ever been composed for musical theater.

The complicated plot centers around Billy, a lovable scamp played with irresistible charm by J. Clayton Winters, who sneaks on a boat headed for England to try to woo Hope, a sweet young socialite, played with ethereal grace and voice by Kelly Silverthorn. But Hope is engaged to Sir Evelyn, played with impeccable comic timing by Max Swarner.

Reno Sweeney, an evangelist turned nightclub singer, played by big-voiced Daron Cockerell with a saucy tongue and racy ways, is willing to help Billy pursue his love even though she likes him herself. Meanwhile, Andy Baldwin scores in one comic bit after another as a gangster traveling in disguise who takes a liking to Billy, and finds some criminally creative ways to help him out.

One aspect of Cole Porter’s brilliance as both composer and lyricist was his ability to seamlessly meld high and low art, classic references with pop culture, high brow feelings with raunchy ones, epitomized by relationships that break down barriers between social classes. The theme and philosophy is crystallized in one of the show’s most unforgettable songs, “You’re the Top,” where Billy and Reno exchange compliments by comparing each other to fabulous things from a Shakespeare sonnet and Mickey Mouse in one lyric to romantic poets Keats and Shelley and Ovaltine in another. This production by Lyric Stage belongs on the list.

Anything Goes: TheaterJones review

It’s the Top

Lyric Stage’s reconstructed production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, with original orchestrations, is simply de-lovely.

Gregory Sullivan Isaacs

Irving —  Anything Goes may be the name of the hit revival of the 1934 hit Cole Porter musical currently playing at the hit-prone Lyric Stage in Irving, but it is far from the philosophy of producer Steven Jones and musical director Jay Dias. This is a carefully researched recreation of the original show, just as audiences saw it before it opened on Broadway, at the Boston tryout, in the last few halcyon years before the start of World War II.

The show was written as a vehicle for the brassy Ethel Merman in the role of Reno Sweeney, who traded in her evangelist extravaganza for another showbiz career as a nightclub entertainer. There is a 1936 movie version, produced by Paramount, with Merman struttin’ her stuff for the silver screen. In 1954, a middle-aged Merman sashayed her way through the role once again, in a drastically rewritten version for television.

Indeed, these film versions were just the start of the challenge Dias faced to bring the original version to the Lyric Stage. Dias received permission from the Cole Porter Trust to spend a considerable amount of time digging through the archives at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to find the original script and musical score.

The stage show exists in five versions. In addition to the original 1934 version, there is a version crafted for the 1962 revival, and one for the revival of 1987 and yet another for the 2011 production. In addition to the film and television versions mentioned earlier, Dias was especially interested in restoring the original full orchestra score, in some delightfully clever orchestrations by the master of such things, Robert Russell Bennett.

But any fear that this would be a musicologist’s meticulous and excruciatingly tedious delivery was dashed away with a boisterous cymbal crash elicited by an ecstatic Dias’ first emphatic downbeat. Thanks to Penny Ayn Maas, in an impressive Lyric Stage debut as director and choreographer, and an astonishingly capable assemblage of performers, the energy on the stage was just as explosive.

The plot is a silly confection that allows for some terrific comic scenes, many right out of vaudeville, and great Cole Porter songs to go with them. Basically, an odd collection of colorful characters, which are tangentially related by the wildest of circumstances, all end up on a luxury liner enroute from New York to London.

In the Merman role of Reno Sweeney, Daron Cockerell takes a different tack. Wearing one stunning evening gown after another, thanks to costume coordinator Margaret Claahsen, she is more Celine Dion than Bette Midler. But traces of her true nature, a bighearted-wrong-side-of-the-tracks broad, peek out under her carefully crafted elegant couture.

The roles for the two male leads were originally written for a male comedy team, quite well-known at the time: William Gaxton and Victor Moore. Such teams were wildly popular over the years, from Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin to Cheech and Chong, but seem to have faded. Traditionally one was the straight man, a romantic lead matinee idol type, and the other was a goofball. Thus, the two leading male leads in Anything Goes fit that pattern: Billy Crocker and “Moonface” Martin.

Billy Crocker, played by J. Clayton Winters, is a handsome rascal of a Wall Street broker. He works for Elisha J. Whitney, played with just the right amount of stuffiness by David Meglino, a benevolent tyrant, who depends on him so much that he regularly fires him. Winters is able to capture Billy’s effervescent charm, which has gotten him out of just slightly more scrapes that it has caused.

His comic foil is “Moonface” Martin, a criminal so dim-witted and incompetent that he only made No. 13 on the Most Wanted list. As Moonface, Andy Baldwin, a rubbery comic genius, achieves a height of criminality that is the stuff of dreams for his character. He steals the show. He even steals his “Moonface” moniker out of the program, being listed by his ridiculously inappropriate incognito name, Reverend Dr. Moon.

Baldwin is a superb comic actor with impeccable timing and the physical skills of a mime and dancer. Like all of the greats, Baldwin doesn’t even need lines to crack up the audience; his trusty machine gun serves as prop that proves his tough-guy pseudo-criminality and masculinity.

Billy is madly in love with Hope Harcourt, a beautiful heiress about to be married off to Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, the attractive but clueless scion of a family with a coat of arms but little else, to save his family’s failing fortunes. Kelly Silverthorn, a winsome beauty, brings quite a bit of depth to her portrayal of the ironically named Hope. Her situation is indeed hopeless: depending on the feckless Billy to rescue her from a stultifying future filled with titles, curtsies, and tea cozies.

Max Swarner gives the unfortunately named Evelyn an unexpected boyish charm as he raises the bar on naiveté to stratospheric levels. He also has the best voice on the stage. Evelyn is as bored with Hope as she is with him, so when he meets her exact opposite, the flashy Reno, sparks fly. Both Swarner and Cockerell are at their best portraying this yin-and-yang love-at-first-sight romance, which also has the added bonus of horrifying their parents.

Hope’s society matron of a mother, Mrs. Wadsworth T. Harcourt, is played to the hilt by Deborah Brown, who looks like she is wearing the entire contents of her steamer trunk. Her dismay at losing her daughter to a ne’er-do-well like Billy is only exceeded by seeing Evelyn, her chance to enter Burke’s Peerage, run off with a floozy like Reno Sweeney. Lord Oakleigh, played with stuff-shirted stiffness by a tut-tutting Mark Oristano, sees his son’s scandalous spousal selection and the Harcourt fortune is forfeited. But far worse than that, the new Lady Oakleigh is a nightclub-singing strumpet. Ya gotta love it!

The entire cast is terrific and equally talented as singers and dancers. At one point, they break into a huge tap-dancing production number with enviable accuracy. Reno’s boldly blonde coterie of chorus girls squeals delightfully and dances with the precision of the Rockettes. A lonesome squad of sailors strolls by offering a nautical version of a barbershop quartet.

And, of course, out of Cole Porter’s creative spigot flows a stream of hit songs that have achieved immortality: “Anything Goes,” “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “It’s De-lovely” and “Let’s Misbehave”—just to name a few. There are also songs added back that were cut in the Boston tryouts.

On the downside, the first act is too long and the energy falls flat in the second act; but this is the fault of the show and not this production. Things were moved around and rewritten for subsequent productions to solve this problem.

However, this doesn’t really matter to audiences at the Lyric Stage. Nowhere else, not in New York or Paris or London, do you have the chance to see Cole Porter’s mega-hit Anything Goes in its original incarnation, with a full symphony orchestra in the pit, led by Dias, and a superb cast on the stage.

Anything Goes: BBW review

ANYTHING GOES at Lyric Stage

Kyle Christopher West

There may only be a few remaining performances of Lyric Stage‘s ANYTHING GOES, but there’s still plenty to see and hear before the ship sails beyond closing night this Sunday. The show (which features a cast of 37 actors and an astounding 33-piece orchestra) appears as a never-before-seen edit, written exclusively for Lyric Stage by musical director and conductor Jay Dias. With over three hours of old fashioned musical theatre comedy on stage, there’s surely something to please the whole family in this lavish, timeless tale.

Dias’ restructuring of the 1934 Broadway script may minimize the famous dance numbers, but makes room for a handful of Cole Porter songs that did not make the cut for the original production, including “Kate The Great,” “Sailor’s Chanty,” and “Waltz Down The Aisle.” Four official scripts of ANYTHING GOES exist, but the two versions that are generally available for licensing exclude at least five of the twenty selections Dias has included for this production. Although Dallas audiences are familiar with Dias’ impeccable orchestra leadership (which deserves epic praise), it’s his commitment to the material that’s especially impressive.

Among the large and local cast, there’s certainly a wide range of talent, but Lyric’s company does not fail to deliver exceptional vocal performances (as always). Yet, several performances elevate the company’s suburb product, most notably Andy Baldwin as Reverend Dr. Moon and Daron Cockerell as the iconic Reno Sweeny. As “Moonface Martin,” Baldwin turns the somewhat tired and trite role into a fresh, amusing highlight of the show, full of physically comedic antics and one liners. His interpretation manages to honor the 1930′s style of writing without ever feeling stale or over-the-top. Ms. Cockerell’s soul-shaking vocal range shows great versatility in this classic score. Her renditions of “I Get A Kick Out Of You,” “Anything Goes,” and “Buddie, Beware” show not only contrasting sides of her dynamic voice, but of her sassy and sultry personality as well. It’s performers like Baldwin and Cockerell, constantly delivering professional-caliber work, that give local theatre a good name.

With credits in Broadway productions of CRAZY FOR YOU, DAMN YANKEES and CABARET on her resume, it’s thrilling to have Penny Ayn Maas on the roster as both director and choreographer. Though this production omits some of ANYTHING GOES’ more well-known and lively numbers (“Heaven Hop,” “Friendship,” Take Me Back To Manhattan,” “Let’s Step Out”), Maas’ choreography manages to bring out the best of the enormous ensemble, with clean stage pictures and intricate traffic patterns interestingly painting the stage. Her efforts are occasionally less successful in the show’s lengthy scenes, where the pacing is sluggish and transitions are tiresome. With three hours of material, the speed of the show could use a bit of a jolt.

No matter what, audiences know Lyric as the time machine to The Golden Age of Broadway, and this team triumphs in transporting DFW back with enthusiasm. With a stage full of singing sailors and exciting Angels, not to mention the unbeatable musicians, it unlikely that anyone won’t get a kick out of this crew.