Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

to sing. But do these changes make the 1987 Anything Goes superior to the original? Is it any funnier to hear a new set of topical jibes at Yale, Porter’s alma mater, in a libretto created by two former Harvard roommates? Is it an improvement that Reno in 1934 is asked by Billy to seduce Sir Evelyn while in 1987 Reno meets and falls in love with the Englishman on her own?

What is lost and gained by this book surgery? Gone from latter-day versions of Anything Goes, for example, is much of the Marx Brothers humor built on puns and misunderstandings. Note the following exchange between Mrs. Wentworth (a humorless society matron not unlike Groucho’s Margaret Dumont) and Moon, an exchange missing from the 1962 and 1987 revivals. Are modern audiences better or worse off for its absence?

MRS. WENTWORTH: We have a great deal to talk about. You see, I’m honorary president of the Texas Epworth League.

MOON: Oh, the Texas League—you must know the Dean Boys.

MRS. WENTWORTH: The Dean boys?

MOON: Yes, Dizzy and Daffy.

MRS. WENTWORTH: No, I don’t remember them—

MOON: Well, you ask the Detroit Tigers about them. They remember them.

MRS. WENTWORTH: The Detroit Tigers? I know a family in Detroit named Lyons.

MOON: Lyons? Well, I know Maxie Baer [the boxing champion], but he’s from San Francisco.

MRS. WENTWORTH: Ah, San Francisco. Have you ever been there?

MOON: I summered a few years at San Quentin.

MRS. WENTWORTH: San Quentin … Is that near Santa Clara?

MOON: Clara wasn’t there when I was there. I wonder what ever became of Clara?

MRS. WENTWORTH: I’m not sure I understood what you just said.

MOON: Well, I wasn’t listening.33

Some things about the evolving Anything Goes books stay the same the more they change. In 1987 Billy still has the opportunity to reply when asked his nationality that he is Pomeranian—the beard he is wearing was taken from a dog of that breed—even though Reno no longer notices that Billy is “putting on the dog.”34 Although many of the original puns and gags had disappeared by 1987, one 1934 line, “calling all pants,” remained a part of Anything Goes scripture because it always got a laugh, even though no one involved in the production was able to explain why it was so funny or even precisely what it meant (the discussion of the 1936 film adaptation of Anything Goes in chapter 8 should hopefully clear up this mystery).

This survey of the reworked books for Anything Goes in 1962 and 1987 evokes a paradox: comedy seems especially susceptible to becoming dated, yet many of the plays that have survived from the 1930s are comedies rather than serious dramas. Revivals of George S. Kaufman’s and Moss Hart’s comedies You Can’t Take It with You (1936) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) or Noël Coward’s British import Private Lives (1930) are frequent guests on modern stages, yet audiences may have to wait a lifetime before getting an opportunity to see Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935). Theater historian Gerald Bordman, who plays an active role in the resurrection of unjustifiably forgotten musicals, concedes “that some older musicals seem old-fashioned,” but is quick to point out that “so are gingerbread houses, Charles Dickens, and Mozart symphonies.”35

Dramatic and Musical Meaning

Is it fair to ask of Anything Goes what we ask of some of the other musicals featured in this volume? What dramatic meaning does the work possess, and how is this meaning conveyed through Porter’s music? What, if anything, goes? In fact, Anything Goes is about many things, including the wrong-headedness of disguises and pretenses of various kinds and the unthinking attraction that common folk have for celebrities, even celebrity criminals.

Perhaps the central dramatic moral of Anything Goes is that sexual attraction and the desire for wealth exert a power superior to friendship and camaraderie in determining long-term partnerships. A few minutes into the play, for example, we learn that Reno has a romantic interest—or, as Sir Evelyn will later declare in his typical malapropian American English, “hot pants”—for Billy that has gone unreciprocated for years. In any event, although Billy thinks Reno is the “top” as well, he nevertheless enlists her help to wean Sir Evelyn from Hope, Evelyn’s fiancée at the beginning of the musical.

The final pairing of Hope with Billy and Reno with Sir Evelyn has some satisfying aspects to it. Billy brings out the “gypsy” in Hope and, because he stays on board the ship, he is eventually able to extricate Hope and her family from a bad marriage and financial ruin. For her part, Hope proves a positive influence in Billy’s life when she persuades him to drop his pretenses and confess that he is not the celebrity criminal Snake Eyes Johnson, even though he will be penalized by the rest of the ship, even temporarily imprisoned, for his newfound integrity. Reno rekindles Sir Evelyn’s dormant masculinity; Sir Evelyn will continue to entertain his future bride by his quaint Britishisms and distortions of American vernacular and, not incidentally, make an excellent provider for the lifestyle to which Reno would like to become accustomed.

But there is a darker side to the happily-ever-after denouement in this rags-to-riches Depression fantasy. Even though Hope appreciates Billy’s persistence and joie de vivre, she berates him for being a clown and will not speak to him until he confesses (at her insistence) that he is not Snake Eyes Johnson. More significantly, the main reason Reno rather than Hope remains “the top” is because Porter’s music for Reno is the top. For all his wealth, the non-singing Sir Evelyn might be considered the consolation prize.

Porter certainly cannot be faulted for giving nearly all his best songs in the show—“I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Anything Goes,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow”—to Reno as played by Merman, a singer-actress of true star quality. As the curtain opens, Reno sings the first two of these songs to Billy, the man she supposedly loves, before he asks her to seduce Sir Evelyn so