A fairy-tale romance

How strange to be thoroughly seduced and pleasured by a 1930s farcical romance, a musical about upper-crust hedonists so escapist that it runs away to fairyland and settles there.

The musical's book, on which PG Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse collaborated, with revisions by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman for the 1987 Broadway revival, takes to ridiculousness with unfair relish: John Barrowman's office junior, Billy, stows away on SS America and finally hooks a debutante due to be married to a silly-ass English lord, though not before Moonface Martin, a gangster, disguised as a clergyman and a female evangelist in a rakish red beret more interested in sex than God are caught in the coils of plot.

Of course, Anything Goes, welcomed with superlatives when Trevor Nunn's buoyant production premiered at the National Theatre last December, enjoys the driving allure of Cole Porter's glorious music and lyrics. In Drury Lane, where John Gunter's stage model of a luxury cruise liner looks cramped and the air of luxury is unduly thin, the musical still works better. Nunn's cast dance, sing and act with fresh vivacity. Porter's music, encompassing the extremes of jazzy, dramatic turbulence and wistful longing for love, induces adrenalin rushes of pleasure. It rises to three climactic surges, when the company surrender to the rhythm and excitement of tap in the theme-song Anything Goes, Blow Gabriel Blow, where the hot gospel evangelicals get the hots and with that classic lyric of unrequited love, I Get A Kick Out Of You.

Stephen Mear's choreography, with its animation of arms and high-kicking, low-tapping feet, is dynamic rather than subtle. Nunn's production shimmers with exuberance, though the orchestra sometimes drown out Porter's wittily ingenious lyrics and the singers. Martin Marquez's benign gangster and Susan Tracy's elderly husband-hunter are delights. John Barrowman's attractive, dashing Billy Crocker seems more laid-back than eager to get laid by Mary Stockley's dim, frigid debutante. But Sally Ann Triplett's night-club singer/ evangelist sizzles with sex appeal and Simon Day's heron-like lord, long of limb, short of sense, face forever deadpan, is a feat of high comedy. The musical sends you out on a high.

Anything Goes