Anything Goes
Theatre | Barbican ★★★★✩
Review by John Nathan
For an audience thirsting for theatre, Cole Porter’s musical shimmers like a mirage. Yet this vision is no trick of the light. The synchronised clatter of tap dancing is confirmation that all is real.
Yet for a while one question lingers. In the age of Covid where ocean-going cruises are associated more with lurgy than luxury, you might think that a musical set aboard a liner might have lost its buoyancy.
But then we are talking about one of the greatest musical scores ever written, the one that kicks off with I Get A Kick Out Of You and rises like the lightest of soufflés with You’re the Top. All this pleasure and still to come is the ecstasy of the title number and the second act climax Blow, Gabriel Blow.
When they do arrive it is here that Kathleen Marshall’s drilled production tap dances itself into full sail and then swaggers into something raunchier, all led by Sutton Foster.
In 2011 the American Broadway star won a Tony for her performance as nightclub diva Reno Sweeney. And despite the muscle memory that must have embedded itself into the limbs there is not a single perfunctory move detectable. Lyrics are not merely sung, they emerge from thoughts the way dialogue should. And when Foster dances, the chorus line appears to expend twice the energy as she does, when throwing exactly the same shapes.
She’s well supported by a cast skimmed from the cream of British comedy acting. Felicity Kendal is the craven mother of a debutante Hope (Nicole-Lily Baisden) marrying her daughter off to an English lord (a terrific Haydn Oakley); Gary Wilmot is the Mr Magoo-like tycoon who bumps into furniture and says “Sorry madam”; and Robert Lindsay as the machine gun-toting Moonface Martin does enough to be a shoo-in as a mobster in the next production of Kiss Me Kate.
Yet although Samuel Edwards is a lovely dancer, he’s not quite heart throb material so it is hard to credit why Hope and especially Reno fall so heavily for him. But then it is not the logic of the madcap plot you go for, but rather, as the song has it, the sheer “de-lovely” delight of seeing a brilliant musical again in all its glory.
