Every Christmas Daniel Evans whooshes a classic musical on to the stage of the Crucible. A roll call of his successes – Oliver!, Company, My Fair Lady – would serve as a guide to the brightest musical theatre. So it is no surprise that Cole Porter’s Anything Goes should have its day, and that its day should be a corker.
The plot – love and skulduggery on a transatlantic liner – is a series of chortling improbabilities. Although the script has been revised from the PG Wodehouse original, it could do with a bit more of a brush-up. It’s not as funny as it thinks. I mind this a little, but not much. This is the show with some of the best – most intricate, far-reaching, light-footed – lyrics ever written. Not just the title song, but You’re the Top (imagine serenading someone with “you’re cellophane”) and I Get a Kick Out of You. It has tunes which lightly but decisively wire the rhymes into the listener’s ear. You could even make a case for this 80-year-old’s topical resonance. The SS America on which the action takes place is loaded with bust bankers and celebrity gangsters.
Evans’s production has at its centre the transforming talent of the choreographer Alistair David. He seizes on Porter’s brilliant patter and swooning exultation and puts them into 3D. He makes sequences grow effortlessly out of tableaux. Women lounging on sunbeds languidly stretch their limbs to perform a horizontal ballet; under dappled lights and uttering gurgling notes, bathing belles swim around the stage. In Blow, Gabriel, Blow (“Come on you scamps, get up you sinners! You’re all too full of expensive dinners”), Debbie Kurup delivers the revivalist number in red Lurex and feathers. She sways as if wafted by breezes that whip around the stage to turn into a tornado. Apart from anything else, this show should do for tap what Billy Elliot did for ballet.
Stephen Matthews is cleverly funny as the upper-class fellow who comes on as a ferrety invert and in one number, shimmying in his dressing gown, turns into a Gypsy sex bomb. Alex Young is irresistibly exuberant as the woman who can’t get enough of sailors. Kurup, though, is the star – and a gloriously varied one. She belts out her numbers (she has all the biggest) and she soars. She is fluidly beguiling but also kooky, full of jagged little gestures. Anything Goes should make her name.
