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25/02/2004 Cole Porter's Anything Goes - exhilarating production at the Theatre Royal
Anyone who presumes sophisticated American song writing started with Bob Dylan should step back several decades and check out lyrical virtuoso Cole Porter, one of America’s all-time musical greats, whose masterpiece Anything Goes is playing London’s Theatre Royal until August. Walking into the middle of this production (as we did, five minutes late as usual), you are immediately transported into a bygone era, an era almost out of living memory, but an era, with its racy wit and urbane sophistication, that seems remarkably similar to our own. What strikes the contemporary listener about Porter’s beautiful song writing is that it excels in quite unfamiliar ways. To an audience raised on rock, the quality of a lyric is equated with its emotional intensity and intimacy, its success based on its ability to bare the soul. With Porter, on the other hand, lightness, nonchalance and playful dexterity are the prevailing aesthetic. These qualities are brought into sharper focus if you compare Anything Goes with Porgy and Bess, that other great contender for definitive musical of the era, which is operatic, tragic and deep - as soulful and earthy as the muddy Mississippi River and its cast of black slaves. Anything Goes, by comparison, is as light and breezy as the deck of the luxury cruiser it's set on, as suave as its millionaire passengers, a crowd to which Porter, the upper class playboy and Yale graduate, belonged. There are no deep explorations of the soul here, and none were intended: it's, rather, an exploration of the Soul of the Modern Age, in all its excitement and dynamism. And shallowness. Urbane sophistication is the essence of Anything Goes, modernity its key note. One of the major elements of this modernity, suggested in the musical’s very title, is permissive hedonism - the rich getting their kicks from cocaine, champagne, and jazz, in an era when jazz was much less about chin-stroking and far more about wild dancing and sexual abandon. This sensibility subverts conservative social mores and hierarchies, which are subtly but mercilessly derided and turned into farce: the English lord -“the tea bag”- is a hopelessly sheltered and clueless buffoon trying to learn hip phrases and always getting them wrong; the Wall Street millionaire is a sex-pest drunkard; the religious preacher is a raunchy long-legged club singer; when he’s caught, the bloodthirsty gangster is given the all-star celebrity treatment, including dinner with the captain - an irony that seems all the more puissant in our age of celebrity worship, typified by Heat magazine and I’m A Celebrity - Get Me Out Of Here. These social foibles are all fair game to a wit as clever and broad-ranging as it is shallow and playful, a wit that works through an off-the-cuff remark, a nod and a wink towards something decadent, with characters wanting to “Get a boil on my tail and then talk about it”. Porter’s verbal dexterity is effortlessly reeled off, time and time again, in songs like You’re The Tops (“You’re Napoleon Brandy, you’re Mahatma Ghandi, you’re Mickey Mouse”) or Friendship (“If they ever crack you’re spine, drop me a line; if they ever cut your throat, write me a note”). This wit dazzles like the mirror balls of the ship’s dance hall or the gold lame dresses of the cast - it's dazzling, seductive and exhilarating. Cole Porter flawlessly captured the modernity of the 1930s. His best work preserves the spirit of an age - an age that was, clearly, as clever and as much fun as our own. © Michael John (aka Giro Playboy) 2004
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