Anything goes

There's mayhem and confusion on the high seas before stockbroker Billy is finally able to embrace his beloved heiress Hope, who was actually supposed to marry someone else in Europe. But luckily, the singer Reno Sweeney is on board too, not to mention a wanted dangerous criminal as well as Billy's boss …

Art is what the world becomes, not what the world is.

Karl Kraus

"Why tackle tough themes in the theatre when times are tough too?" producer Vinton Freedley asked in the summer of 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression. So he commissioned Cole Porter to write a totally light-hearted show which was intended to portray, in an entertaining way and with plenty of music, the mixture of society on a casino ship and its grotesque reactions to the sinking of the ship. But barely three months before the premiere, a real pleasure boat was involved in an accident off the coast of New Jersey, and the plot was changed to the story of Billy Crocker's hunt for his true love with the help of Reno Sweeney. Porter and his authors turned it into a masterpiece of verbal and musical dexterity, driven by a wonderful score containing all the trends to be found in the popular music of the time, from jazz and the big band sound, through vaudeville to sea shanties. And songs such as "I Get A Kick Out Of You", "It’s De-Lovely" and "Let's Misbehave" have lost nothing of their appealing freshness even today. A phenomenal success at its premiere on 21 November 1934 in New York with Broadway stars such as Ethel Merman, William Gaxton and Victor Moore, Anything Goes went on to become the most significant American musical of the 1930s.

For the last time: January 8, 2017