When you have trouble making out the first words that escape the actors’ microphones, you know you’re in for a long night. And the national tour of “Anything Goes,” at the Broward Center, is a very long night.
Set aboard a luxury ocean liner and chronicling the madcap schemes and desires of its caricatured guests, “Anything Goes” is a proudly insubstantial musical, the kind of unabashed escapism that betrays its Depression-era origins (it debuted in 1934). The characters are outsized archetypes: Reno Sweeney (Emma Stratton), a brassy nightclub singer; her friend and potential love interest Billy Crocker (Brian Kinsky), a mid-level Wall Street drone with his heart set on Hope Harcourt (Rachelle Rose Clark), an engaged heiress; Lord Evelyn Oakleigh (Richard Lindenfelzer), Hope’s foppish foreign fiancée; Moonface Martin (Dennis Setteducati), a small-time gangster who has snuck aboard the ship with his slutty moll (Mychal Phillips); etc. The plot writes itself, entangling and orienting its romantically confused cruisers with about as much sense as a cubist painting. Suffice it to say it ends in three weddings.
The sound problems are the show’s most immediate hurdle, and they instantly distract you from the story. The songs are by Cole Porter, and they’re far cleverer than the book’s clunky punch lines, but only if can make out all of Porter’s witty cultural references and deft wordplay. Instead, numbers like “You’re the Top” and “Friendship” are drowned out by the band, thanks to an uneven sound mix. There’s even tinny microphone feedback in some of the spoken dialogue. Forgive me for expecting that in a Broadway Across America production—and I don’t make it to most of these—at least the tech elements would be top-notch.
These issues improve in the second act, but over-arching problems remain, namely the base-level pedestrianism of Kathleen Marshall’s direction and choreography. Audiences expecting to be dazzled (many of whom are still reeling from “Pippin,” after all) will endure a first act of largely unchallenging steps presented with an air of secondhand familiarity. It isn’t until the very end of Act One that an inspired tap number sets the deck ablaze.
The second act, which has about 15 minutes of story and 45 minutes of padding, has an opposite problem: Marshall tries too hard to elicit pizzazz, choreographing routines that far overstay their welcome, despite the considerable energy and sweat equity of its proficient leads and ensemble. This didn’t have to be the case: cornball as this material is, Marcia Milgrom Dodge directed a whizbang production for Maltz Jupiter Theatre in 2010 that featured inventive choreography and, moreover, was genuinely funny. Just compare her fleet-footed take on the jailhouse pop of Moonface’s “Be Like the Bluebird” to Marshall’s staid and boring interpretation.
Stratton is well-cast as Reno Sweeney; she’s a triple-threat talent with a grand set of pipes and an inexhaustible stage presence, who is tasked with, and succeeds in, carrying a couple of group numbers all by herself. Paired with the meek Kinsky, however, she’s a man-eater, and her attraction to his nasally voiced broker is never convincing. She outdances him, too, and so does the lithe Rachelle Rose Clark. Kinsky’s movements are labored while theirs seem effortless, while his singing voice is, to be charitable, an acquired taste.
Derek McLane designed the handsome set of a two-story ship’s exterior and its various boxy, wheeled-in staterooms, though even this has the flimsy appearance of expenses spared—some of the netted backdrop that suspends from the ceiling has large holes in it. Anthony Pearson’s lighting design is one of the show’s few unqualified successes; the shifting palette of colors illuminating from the portholes of the cabins sets a perfect ambience. In a production this misbegotten, I was thankful for whatever small triumph I could find.
“Anything Goes” runs through May 17 at Broward Center’s Au-Rene Theater, 201 S.W. Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $30-$85. Call 954/462-0222 or visit browardcenter.org.
