The Shaw Festival’s production stars Jeff Irving, left, as Billy Crocker, Mary Antonini, centre, as Reno Sweeney and Michael Therriault, right, as Moonface Martin. Anything Goes was first produced on Broadway in 1934.David Cooper/Shaw festival/Supplied
Title: Anything Goes
Written and choreographed by: Kimberley Rampersad
Performed by: Mary Antonini, Celeste Catena, Jeff Irving, Allan Louis, Michael Therriault, Shawn Wright
Company: Shaw Festival
Venue: Festival Theatre
City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
Year: Until Oct. 4, 2025
Modern productions of pre-Golden Age musicals can remind you just how young the form is. Born at the crossroads of vaudeville, operetta and minstrelsy, musical theatre as we understand it today – a cousin of opera, a neighbour to non-musical drama – hasn’t even cracked 150 years.
At the same time, the genre has also evolved quickly since the 1890s. A hit musical now – Maybe Happy Ending, for instance, about two robots in a futuristic Seoul, or Dear Evan Hansen, about an anxious teen in suburban America – tends to bear little resemblance to the early milestone works that paved the way to its existence. Musicals these days are more often sung-through without much spoken dialogue, and, on a good day, the music and story inform each other in a way that feels satisfying and dramaturgically robust.
Anything Goes, first produced on Broadway in 1934, somewhat epitomizes musical theatre’s relative youth – and the speed at which the form has grown up. The show contains some of Cole Porter’s greatest hits, jazz standards including You’re the Top, Blow, Gabriel, Blow and, of course, that eponymous toe-tapper laced with clever rhymes.
But the book, by P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, hasn’t aged as gracefully as the songs tucked between its scenes. Plots are thin; characters thinner.
Shaw Festival raises $110-million for facility renovations, Royal George Theatre revamp
Sure, none of that matters when the songs are performed with aplomb – when the dance numbers ooze with precision and razzle-dazzle.
Alas, the Shaw Festival’s production of Anything Goes only occasionally compensates for the material with its choreography and performances. Kimberley Rampersad’s tap numbers are often out of sync, the sounds muddy as the dancers’ shoes scrape across the stage; the cast, too, occasionally struggles to sing while dancing, panting as they spit out Porter’s lyrics.
And while the production uses an updated script – add Timothy Crouse and John Weidman to the show’s laundry list of book-writers – Anything Goes neither feels like a hazy time capsule of the 1930s nor a retrospective riff on the era’s penchant for sensationalism.
In her director’s note, Rampersad says she crafted the production as a “response to and in resistance to the darkness in this world,” and when all the musical’s moving pieces come together, indeed, the outside world feels deliciously far away. But those moments are few and fleeting.
Shaw Festival reports operating surplus just one year after largest deficit in its history
When we meet nightclub singer Reno Sweeney (Mary Antonini), she’s aboard a ship heading to London. So is Billy Crocker (Jeff Irving), a Wall Street broker in love with Hope Harcourt (Celeste Catena). Small problem, one reminiscent of another famous story about a boat crossing the Atlantic: Hope is set to marry Lord Evelyn Oakleigh (a standout Allan Louis), a Brit whose inability to recall American slang will be his downfall.
Obviously, hijinks ensue – the dastardly Moonface Martin (Michael Therriault) is also on the ship, as is Billy’s boss, Elisha Whitney (Shawn Wright).
It’s a simple story that’s mostly well-acted by Rampersad’s cast – Irving’s Billy is perhaps the strongest of the bunch, adding depth to the character as needed and belting out fabulous high notes as he comes to terms with his feelings for Hope.
Antonini’s Reno – the brassy, belting diva of the high seas – is a trickier affair. At the matinee I attended, Antonini appeared to struggle with Anything Goes’ titular crowd-pleaser, the Act One closer Sutton Foster so memorably nailed at the 2011 Tony Awards.
On Wednesday, musical notes got lost in the shuffle of Rampersad’s shuffles, time steps and cramp rolls, the slurry of taps overpowering and chaotic. I was underwhelmed – by Antonini’s performance and by Rampersad’s choreography, which doesn’t seem to leave ample space for Antonini to catch her breath.
But I sure changed my tune when Blow, Gabriel, Blow rolled around in the second act, a song better suited to Antonini’s range, and with soft-shoe choreography that better allowed Antonini to shine as the production number’s star. It’s not often Anything Goes isn’t the highlight of Anything Goes – but Rampersad and Antonini’s work on Blow, Gabriel, Blow makes a convincing argument for the latter song’s longevity.
There are other highlights of the Shaw Festival’s centrepiece musical: Cory Sincennes’s costumes drip with vintage luxury, with sequins and beads that catch Mikael Kangas’s blazing lights. Sincennes’s nifty set, too, makes a lovely playground for Rampersad’s cast, a spinning hub of maritime machinery and attractive staircases.
Of course, your mileage may vary with this Anything Goes – as a former tap dancer myself, I’m perhaps more sensitive to the production’s choreography and resulting issues than the average audience member. But at its best, Anything Goes ought to be a dazzling display of musical punch and pizzazz, a relic of an increasingly under-produced era of musical theatre; on Wednesday, it was, all in all, just fine. To make the inevitable comparison to another tap show set in the 1930s now playing just a few hours away: It ain’t no Annie.
