Anything Goes (2021)

I’m not positive, but I’m assuming that this London production is pretty much the same as the 2011 Broadway revival, and not just because Sutton Foster plays Reno Sweeney in both. Rather, I remember the Broadway production’s Tony performance of the title number, along with Jonathan Groff’s splendid Miscast recreation of it, and I’d say that’s the same tap routine we see here. I have the cast recording from that production, but even though I enjoy a number of the cast members and Cole Porter’s music, it only gets occasional rotation in the soundtrack of my life. I came away from this Great Performances recording with a similar feeling.

Young, eager Billy Crocker does a dumb thing when he realizes the woman he loves is boarding a ship with her fiancée: he stows away. In between trying to woo his beloved Hope away from her beau, he has to evade both the ship’s captain and his boss, another passenger on the ship who expects Billy to be handling his affairs back on Wall Street. Luckily, Billy has some help from his friend/former flame Reno and, rather unexpectedly, a gangster known as Moonface Martin.

Here's the funny thing. I’ve actually seen Anything Goes live twice, but both of those were high school productions of dubious quality, and while I remembered some of the songs, the broad gist of the love story, and the racism in the ending, I realized watching this video that I didn’t actually know the story of the show. And it’s— I mean, it’s what it is. For the most part, it’s just a frame to hang the Cole Porter songs on, flimsy and farcical with silly jokes and misunderstandings stretched to absurd proportions. This cast manages it fine, but there’s very little that pops onstage.

I will say this production is moderately less racist than the others I’ve seen, and I’m guessing less than the show was initially intended to be. There’s no tropey “chop suey” characterization for John and Luke, and the ending keeps the basic plot beats of the original without going full-blown Charlie Chan. It’s still no great prize for Asian American representation in musical theatre, but the actors playing John and Luke here have fewer cringey moments than usual.

The music is what comes off best, in no small part because of the songs themselves. In addition to the big-ticket numbers like “Anything Goes,” “De-Lovely,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” I also love the swooning melody on “Easy to Love” and the delightful rhymes on “You’re the Top.”

Sutton Foster, no surprise, is the firecracker the production pivots around. As Reno, her belt is strong and her dancing is topnotch, both as usual. Honestly, though, on the acting front, it was just okay for me. The weak book is partly to blame, of course, but either way, I wasn’t really feeling it. Unfortunately, Samuel Edwards is bland to me as Billy, especially in his scenes opposite Foster, and Nicole-Lily Baisden’s Hope is pleasant but a little dull. Robert Lindsay has some amusing moments as Moonface Martin, and Felicity Kendahl is entertaining as Hope’s snobby, overbearing mother. For me, the actor who acquits themselves the best is probably Haydn Oakley as Hope’s gullible fiancée Evelyn. The show gets plenty of corny mileage out of jokes about the British Evelyn not understanding American slang, but Oakley mostly makes it work.

Warnings

Lots of suggestiveness, mild language, drinking/smoking, a little violence, and some sexist/racist humor.