Laughs at sea

Almost two weeks after his production of Sophie's Choice was ripped apart by critical fangs at the Royal Opera House, Trevor Nunn now offers up a witty, champagne drenched revival of Cole Porter's hedonistic hit, Anything Goes.

First performed in 1934, this glorious musical, set on a transatlantic liner, is perfect for anyone who fancies their festive feelgood factor with a barrage of assertively high-kicking chorus girls, reprobate clergymen, wisecracking criminals, and women who could have slunk straight off the pages of Vogue in the Thirties.

Any director putting on a Cole Porter musical knows that most audience members will have been seduced by the tunes and lyrics before walking into the auditorium. As the crowds filed into the Olivier theatre last night, hips wiggled gently, eyes sparkled excitedly, and snatches of Porter's bitingly whimsical melodies were hummed - while the appetite for sophisticated escapism was stoked still further by John Gunter's recreation of a luxurious ocean liner silhouetted against a romantically deep blue sky.

Gore Vidal once wrote that "All history is gossip", and certainly the plot-line, with its gleefully mischievous references to celebrity criminals, dancing female evangelists, and fortunehunting lovers, chronicles the time with all the glib ease of a socialite's chitter-chatter. Reno Sweeney (Sally Ann Triplett) is an evangelist and a nightclub singer, whose fur- trimmed bishop's cassock conceals a multitude of sins and sequins - the only man she cannot attract is the squeaky-clean Billy Crocker, who is devoured by his devotion for the blonder-than-thou debutante Hope Harcourt.

Robert Butler's programme notes reveal that the early Thirties saw Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde hitting the headlines, and PG Wodehouse's script spices up the Reno - Billy - Hope love-triangle by putting them on board ship with Moonface Martin, a gangster disguised as a clergyman (and played with the requisite macho stupidity by Martin Marquez).

Simon Day steals every scene he appears in as Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, Hope's eccentrically stiffupperlipped fiancè, with a willowy anaemic physique that could have been sketched by Max Beerbohm, and a quirkily confident interpretation of the English gentleman stereotype.

Nunn is highly conscious that this is the first of the early Broadway musicals to be performed at the National, and he has graded the intensity of the numbers - played with svelte assurance by the orchestra - from carefully sculpted understatement with minimal, graceful choreography (I Get A Kick Out Of You, Easy to Love) right up to the manically twirling arms, toothy smiles, and energetically tapping toes of the crowd-rousing title-song. Some might worry that there is a prefeminist element to the skimpily sequin-clad routine of Reno's Angels, yet as with Triplett's sassy Reno, ultimately it seems that these women will exploit before they are exploited.

The script sparkles with wit: in one exchange an elderly debutante's mother declares prudishly, "Liquor has never touched my lips," only to be asked by her alcoholic suitor, "You know a short-cut?" The social pangs of Moonface - embarrassed that he is public enemy number 13 rather than public enemy number one - provides biting reminders that our scandal-and-celebrity age is far from unique.

Accusations that Nunn has gone for an over-easy option are more than allayed by this graceful crowd-pleaser, which also coaxes one of the most pitifully comic performances from a Yorkshire terrier since the film A Fish Called Wanda. Nunn's swan-song at the National will be Love's Labour's Lost, but with strong advance bookings already, maybe he will see Anything Goes as his goose that laid the golden eggs.

Box office: 020 7452 3000. Until 22 March.

Anything Goes