Anything Goes

As someone once remarked, ‘musical comedy’ combines the two most beautiful words in the English language. Add Cole Porter’s glorious score and most sophisticated lyrics to a suitably silly book by P G Wodehouse, and you have the thirties greatest musical comedy, a tuneful, toe-tapping tale of shipboard romance and mistaken identity on a transatlantic liner.

Seventy years later, first at the National, now in the West End, director Trevor Nunn has brought together an incomparable cast of actors and musical theatre artists to re-create the blissful delights of the piece, adding beautifully detailed comic business, but with total respect for the genre.

Michael Gibson’s fresh, lively arrangements for a 16-piece orchestra allow the songs to be heard exactly as written, and what songs they are, from the hauntingly romantic Easy To Love and the plaintively comic I Get a Kick Out of You – one that also fuels the high-kicking finale – to Porter’s most inventive list song You’re the Top, not to mention the show-stopping title number and the riotous Blow, Gabriel Blow, with its opportunities for evangelistic striptease.

Not least of the pleasures are John Gunter’s cleverly revolving set and Anthony Powell’s superb Thirties costume designs, revealing the girls as stick-thin and gorgeous. But finally this is a marvellous ensemble staging, every member of a huge cast adding to the effect, plus one absolute knock-out central performance.

As sexy, sizzling Reno Sweeney, an evangelist turned cabaret singer, Sally Ann Triplett emerges as one of London’s finest musical stars, working tirelessly to make this a night no punter will ever forget. The vocal toll of months in the role have brought a new depth to her voice, she could now out-sing even Ethel Merman whose songs these originally were, but with her own unique dancing skills and engaging warmth.

John Barrowman’s tousled hair and brash charm as Billy suggest a Hugh Grant who can sing and dance, Simon Day as the silly-ass Englishman triumphs in his Gypsy number, Martin Marquez is endearing as the gangster with a heart, Mary Stockley a stunning blonde debutante, while Annette McLoughlin as a girl who can’t say ‘no’ to men in sailors’ uniforms is another performance standout.

An ecstatic audience on a wet Tuesday evening gave the company London’s ‘sitting down’ equivalent of a standing ovation. Rival shows may be knocking at the Drury Lane’s stage door but all lovers of musical theatre, not to mention the London Tourist Board, will wish this brilliant entertainment a long life and continued prosperity.