pure poetry
by Douglas Messerli
Cole Porter (music and lyrics), P.
G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, revised by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse,
revised again by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman (book), Anything Goes / the production I saw with Diana Daves was on December 1, 2012 at
Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles
The musical Anything Goes has been rewritten so many times, adding Porter’s
songs from other musicals while subtracting several of the original songs, that
one might almost describe what I witnessed the other day as a shadow of its
first conception, even if, arguably, the layering revisions have burnished it
into a better work. Most of the changes, however, have been to the story, and
since the silly couplings and un-couplings of the work hardly matter, it is
hard to be interested in the “ur-text.” I will be glad to except Timothy
Crouse’s and John Weidman’s assurances that they were “purists” “but only to a
point.” What is important is that they restored as much of Porter’s score as
they could, adding only three wonderful Porter songs “Friendship,” “It’s De-Lovely,”
and “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye.”
The story, in fact, pretty much lives up to the musical’s title, the characters almost changing partners willy-nilly. This time round nightclub singer (former evangelist?) Reno loves Billy, Billy loves Hope, Hope pretends to love Lord Evelyn Oakleigh but really loves Billy, Lord Evelyn loves Reno, Elisha Whitney loves Evangeline Harcourt, and Erma loves everybody. Enough said. The book—whatever version you choose—makes soap operas, by comparison, look like grand operas. “Frothy” is the appropriate word.
Yet this chestnut has been immensely popular since its 1934 opening in
New York, running 420 performances even during the great depression, and
reappearing in successful productions in England and New York in 1935 (261
performances), 1962, 1987 (784 performances), 1989 and 2011 (521 performances).
What I saw was a sold-out performance of the touring version of the 2011
production. Why has it succeeded again and again?
The answer, quite obviously, is not just a cast of talented singers and
dancers (a requirement of course!) but Cole Porter, who in this and other works
turns what might have been tin-pan ditties into pure American poetry. Sure, the
music itself is spritely and often borders on a kind regularized jazz. But
those words! No one, not even Stephen Sondheim, can write as wittily idiomatic
lyrics while pulling his audiences into a kind of licentious world that hints of
everything from adultery and drug addiction to sexual orgies and open
homosexuality, with his characters simultaneously hoofing up innocent-seeming
line dances across the stage.
The fun begins with this show’s very first song, “I Get a Kick Out of
You,” where Broadway libertine Reno Sweeney (the talented Rachel York) tells
Billy about her frigidity concerning everyday life:
I get no
kick from champagne.
Mere
alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all,
So tell
me why should it be true
That I
get a kick out of you?
Some get
a kick from cocaine.
I’m sure
that if I took even one sniff
That
would bore me terrific’ly too
Yet I
get a kick out of you.
Or consider the wonderful shifts in the notion of “friendship” in the
song titled that. It begins as a song of spirited support of one being for
another, in this case the musical’s two major “hustlers,” Reno and Moonface
Martin (the 13th most wanted criminal):
If you’re ever
in a jam, here I am
If you’re ever
in a mess, S.O.S.
If you’re so happy, you land in jail. I’m your bail.
But gradually as they each try to outdo one another in imagining
life-saving necessities, the song becomes a kind of contest which reveals that
underneath their “perfect friendship” there is not only an open competitiveness
but a true hostility:
If they ever
black your eyes, put me wise.
If they ever
cook your goose, turn me loose.
If they ever
put a bullet through your brain, I’ll complain.
The lyrics grow even more outlandish
as they imagine the worst for one another:
If you ever
lose your mind, I’ll be kind.
And if you
ever lose your shirt, I’ll be hurt.
If you ever
in a mill get sawed in half, I won’t laugh.
It finally ends with imagining each
other being eaten by cannibals, in which the second half answers “invite me.”
These are not the words of supportive human beings, but of criminals who
might turn on each other in a minute. Plumbing the unconscious depths of
Americans’ fascination with violence—notably present in the entertainments of
the 1930s—Porter has created almost a paean to the macabre, a world wherein
people land up in jail, put bullets through brains, lose their minds, get sawed
in half, and are consumed by cannibals, lines somewhat reminiscent of William
Carlos Williams’ observation “the pure products of America / go crazy” and
Allen Ginsberg’s opening line in Howl:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked….”
Hearing once more the musical’s title song, “Anything Goes,” I realized
that, again, the most important thing about this work is its lyrics—which
unfortunately, in the quick-paced rhythms, got somewhat lost in York’s
rendition; suddenly it became clear to me that the original Reno, played by
Ethel Merman, with her emphatic pronunciations of every word, may have been the
perfect Porter interpreter—ensuring that the audiences heard every one of
Porter’s quips.
Like the peeved reactions of conservative parents through the mid 1960s,
Porter presciently reiterates the very same issues of change in his opening
refrain:
Times have
changed
And we’ve
often got a shock,
When they
landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today,
Any shock
they should try to stem,
‘Stead of
landing of Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth
Rock would land on them.
The song goes on to explain the
topsy-turvy morality of the contemporary world:
The world
has gone mad today
And good’s
bad today,
And
black’s white today,
And day’s
night today,
When most
guys today
That women
prize today
Are just
silly gigolos
Porter might almost have added: “Or
are gay today.” Porter does add himself, indirectly, to that list:
Good
authors too who once knew better words,
Now only
use four letter words
Writing prose, anything goes.
In such an “anything goes” atmosphere
Porter was freed up to even question the normal structure of his songs, to
query and even challenge the standard introductory lead-ins and normalized
language of Broadway music:
[hope]
I feel a
sudden urge to sing
The kind
of ditty that invokes the spring.
[billy]
I’ll control my desire to curse
While you
crucify the verse.
[hope]
This verse
I started seems to me
The
Tin-Pantithesis of a melody.
[billy]
So spare us all the pain,
Just skip
the darn thing and sing the refrain…
Of course, what they sing is
“delightful, delicious, de-lovey, delirious” in its de-construction of the
English language, letting themselves go in thrilling, drilling (de-de-de-de) of
words that suggest being out of control.
Porter’s lyrics almost always seem to be slightly over the top, about to
spill over into pure ridiculousness as they finally do in “You’re the Top,”
where the same couple, Reno and Billy, again in an attempt to outdo one
another, compare each other with almost anything that comes to mind, from the
Louvre Museum, to a symphony by Strauss, to a Shakespeare sonnet and even
Mickey Mouse, blithely jumping across the bodies of outstanding individuals,
expensive drinks, glorious visions of nature, national institutions, celebrity
salaries, to end in marvelous industrial creations, moving across the whole
society as if it were all of one piece—not unlike Williams in his Spring and All. *
You’re
the top!
You’re
Mahatma Gandhi.
You’re
the top!
You’re
Napoleon Brandy.
You’re
the purple light
Of a
summer night in Spain,
You’re
the National Gallery
You’re
Garbo’s salary,
You’re
cellophane.**
Never has the simple metaphor been
used to such an extreme example! At one grand moment the couple compare each
other to the great romantic poets only to suddenly drop into the most banal of
American consumer products:
You’re
Keats.
You’re
Shelley,
You’re
Ovaltine. (,)
hinting at the purist poetry
possible!
*Compare, for example, these lines
from Williams’ Spring and All from
1923:
O “Kiki”
O Miss Margaret Jarvis
The backhandspring
I: clean
clean
clean: yes . . New York
Wrigley’s, appendicitis, James
Marin:
Skyscraper soup—
Either that or a bullet!
**Surely it is not coincidental that in the very same year as the Broadway production of Anything Goes, 1934, Four Saints in Three Acts, Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s noted opera, premiered in Hartford, Connecticut, the set festooned with cellophane. The opera had been previously performed in Ann Arbor in a concert version in 1933.
Los Angeles, December 4, 2012
Reprinted from US Theater, Opera and Performance (December 2012).
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