Review: Anything Goes by Texas State University
by Michael Meigs
Kaitlyn Hopkins' staging of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes is as big, bright and shining as the 1930's trans-Atlantic cruise ship that's the setting for this carefree romp. The large talented cast of Texas State students and that 13-piece orchestra in the pit of the brand spanking new Performing Arts Center fill the stage and hall with joyful energy. Cassie Abate's choreography ranges from clever duets (think Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) to happy tapping, bouncing extravaganzas so precisely choreographed you'd think that only angels dancing on the decks of a heaven-bound liner could equal them.
This gleaming musical vehicle launches the Patty Strickel Harrison Theatre, and its namesake benefactress was in attendance on opening night. It's a palace of performance, complete with well-equipped stage, capacious orchestra pit and soaring ranks of comfortable seating, constructed literally a stone's throw just west of the offices and amphitheatre-style interior performing facility of the Department of Theatre. The Harrison Theatre offers big-city sweep and sophistication, and it features an impressive sculpture on historical Texan themes.
The plot of Anything Goes is a compendium of 1934 silliness centered upon Billy Crocker, the penniless office boy who winds up stowing away on the cruise ship in hopes of winning the heart of heiress Hope Harcourt. Stephen Brower as Billy has a fine tenor, wide-eyed appeal, and swift and certain dance moves. His duet dance number with Morgan MacInnes as Hope could have been scissored directly out of a film of the era.
Comic characters, sailors, and a girl backgroup group of 'angels' fill up the rest of the decks on Michelle Ney's bright, vast set. Among them is Moonface Martin, who seems pretty squeaky clean for a Public Enemy #13. Fooling, hiding and cracking wise in that comic role, Ian Saunders is very impressive. He's a comic with super timing, a born song-and-dance vaudevillian. On opening night Erin Erxleben was his female sidekick Erma, a pert, perky comedienne with a cheerfully naughty appeal for her trail of dancing sailors.
Onboard entertainment is led by nightclub chanteuse Reno Sweeny, the statuesque Annie Wallace, with a voice and confidence that wouldn't quit.
Other standouts in this large cast are fine character actors Michael Burell as goofy myopic tycoon Eusha J. Whitney and Jimmy Moore as the foppish English aristocrat Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, Hope's bound-to-be-outwitted fiancé.
Cole Porter's music is familiar -- or should be, to anyone enamored of the great trans-Atlantic songbook -- and the choreography by Cassie Abate is by turns elegant, clever and thrilling in scope and energy.
So hellzapoppin in San Marcos, and by the evidence of this show, director Katilyn Hopkins has established a superb training regime and attracted young persons of outstanding talent. They take this mannered 80-year-old construction by storm and give it verve and flash.
Let's pause a moment, however, and reflect on the changes that have transformed the audiences since this one enchanted New Yorkers in 1934. We can see some deficiencies and insularities of the self-styled sophisticates of the time. I hope that director Hopkins and other educators footnoted these for their eager disciples, as was their duty. The director's program note offers a thrilling anecdote from a 2002 performance but says nothing about the cultural context of the original.
One can enjoy the scratchy recaptures of the black-and-white movies of the 1930's without the least misgiving. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's On the Road pictures were full of bizarre caricatures of Africans, Asians and American ethnicities; the bizarrely wonderful musical Cabin in the Sky, the movie Green Pastures and other vehicles for African-American performers of the day now seem absurdly patronizing. Walt Disney rigorously suppressed the magical Song of the South some fifteen years after its release because the warmly human Uncle Remus played by James Baskett came across instead as an Uncle Tom after the opening campaigns for civil rights.
Live performance should be different, in my opinion. Anything Goes bases a key plot turn on the fey English aristocrat's confession, during the show's happy evocation of an Afro-American revival, of an indiscretion in the rice paddies with a young Chinese woman named Plum Blossom. A couple of improbable pidgin-speaking Chinese coolies are paraded by an overblown and overcostumed Anglican missionary; they turn out to be cardsharps subsequently outsmarted by Moonface. The elaborate final tableau with multiple engagements (reminiscent of Shakespearean happily-ever-after endings) becomes possible when the comic leads appear in coolie garb and thrust Reno upon the Englishman, alleging that she is 'Prum Brossom.'
I laughed as much as anyone at these pranks but I did feel a keen stab of unease. I remembered that three years ago an Austin city councilman received angry letters protesting the 'humiliating yellow-face' presentation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. That piece is an innocent lampoon of British society disguised as the then-fashionable exoticism of Japan.
At Tuesday's sold-out opening night a family of three situated close to us had managed to get some of the last available seats. Their daughter, a lively girl about ten years old with Asian features, was clearly delighted by the entertainment. We could only wonder what her adoptive parents were thinking.
Further gentle nudges, mostly for fun. The original book wasn't by 'P.G. Woodenhouse,' and student proofreaders are encouraged to take a look at any of P.G. 'Plum' Wodehouse's light-hearted novels about Bertie Wooster and his gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves. And the university's stage combat instructor is Toby (not 'Tobie') Minor, a valued active Austin theatre artist.
Reinforce the brig, so that the bars don't wobble! And we were disconcerted and fairly annoyed by the positioning of the men's body mics. They looked like giant carbuncles or pustules in the middle of their foreheads. Costume change requirements may have dictated this, but Billy Crocker's bump was particularly distracting.
This was finely crafted entertainment, though, and a delight to behold. Almost everything went!
Anything Goes
by Cole Porter
Texas State University Department of Theatre, Dance and Film
April 7 at 7:30 p.m. | Preview $5 tickets
April 8 – 15 at 7:30 p.m. & April 13 at 2 p.m.
Tickets Now on Sale: $15 - $18 general admission and $8 for students with a valid Texas State ID.
Box Office: For reservations, visit www.txstatepresents.com. Additional Information: Please contact (512) 245-2147 April 7 at 7:30 p.m. | Preview $5 tickets
