The song list includes some of Porter's biggest hits, "I Get A Kick Out of You," "Easy To Love," "You're the Top," "Friendship," "It's De-lovely," "Blow, Gabriel, Blow," and of course, "Anything Goes."
This show wastes no time setting itself apart from more human-sized productions. The set designed by Derek McLane is full-out Broadway, depicting a glistening art deco ocean liner that fills the theater's entire performance space, stretching across the stage from curtain to curtain and towering up into the rigging.
The glamour keeps growing with a continuous parade of elegant gowns sent swirling all around that ship's brass-railed decks in the classic ballroom-influenced choreography of Kathleen Marshall, who is also the director.
It doesn't hurt to remember that America's economy in 1934, muddling through the Great Depression, wasn't much different from today. Many people were running on fumes and living on dreams.
That is the economy, and taking the rich down a peg or two is still great sport. Pop culture, of course, has seen so many sweeping changes from hemlines to coke lines to the internet that an appropriate description becomes difficult.
Suffice it to say, "Anything Goes" is full of goofy shtick, old school sexy enuendo and other escapist fare that sweeps one up in its manicured hands to a polished and proper world free of irritating cell phones and profanity-spewing rap stars.
Rachel York dons the centerpiece role of Reno Sweeney, a one-time evangelist seduced by the bright lights of becoming a nightclub entertainer. Ethel Merman with all her fireball enthusiasm grabbed this role by the throat in 1934 and promptly became the show's throbbing heart.
York is a lovely, tall and slender woman with all of the class, if not all the sass, you would expect from a revival preacher intent on reaching deep down inside your alcohol-soaked body to yank out and save your miserable soul.
She gets some of the best lines, as well, to set a lively pace that's maintained by Erich Bergen as the boyish Billy Crocker hopelessly in love with sweet Hope (Alex Finke), whose future has already been booked by her mother (Sandra Shipley), intending that Hope should marry the wealthy Englishman, a rather foppish Lord Evelyn Oakleigh (Edward Staudenmayer).
In there to complicate matters is good-natured (most of the time) gangster Moonface Martin (Fred Applegate) and the stately ship's Captain (Chuck Wagner).
At the beginning of "Anything Goes," all the women are with the wrong men. By the end, everyone has an appropriate partner – just like God intended.
"Anything Goes" continues through Sunday, Nov. 25, at the Music Hall, 260 S, Church Ave., with performances at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, no performance Thursday, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $29-$90. For details and reservations, 1-800-745-3000, www.broadwayintucson.com. Avoid extra fees by purchasing tickets in person at the Tucson Convention Center box office, 260 S. Church Ave.
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