NT's Anything Goes

Joanne · **Posted:** Mon Dec 09, 2002 2:45 am

Preview article in the Times.

Quote:

TRY WRITING a scintillating satire on the affectations of all the poseurs that you know, replete with innuendos of the lewdest variety. Then make it rhyme. Not just with end-of-line rhymes, but with those tricky, internal ones much admired by the more delicate Victorian poets. Rhymes such as:
Good authors too, who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words writing prose;
Anything goes

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Sun Dec 15, 2002 9:52 am

Curtain up, light the lights
As a dazzling Anything Goes pulls them in at the National, Kate Kellaway for The Observer asks why everybody loves Cole Porter - plus who's who in panto and your Christmas show round-up

Christmas is a performance: we dress up ourselves and our houses and hope that no one forgets their lines. And every year, the theatre contributes its own traditional menu - A Christmas Carol, Cinderella, The Snowman ... and other old chestnuts (familiar and indispensable as Christmas stuffing). But for those who long for a breath of fresh air, Anything Goes - directed by Trevor Nunn at the National - will, I predict, be just that. In fact, I am prepared to bet, with every coin in my Christmas pudding, that it will make us feel suddenly that it is not - after all - such an effort to be in a festive mood.
'In olden days a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking/ But now, heaven knows, anything goes./ Good authors, too, who once knew better words/ Now only use four- letter words writing prose, Anything goes.'

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Joanne · **Posted:** Thu Dec 19, 2002 3:00 am

Review in The Times.

Quote:

TREVOR NUNN has spent several recent Christmas and summer seasons bringing a new seriousness to Oklahoma!, South Pacific and My Fair Lady, but last night he let his hair down beyond his beard.
His revival of Cole Porter’s 1934 musical Anything Goes is terrific fun. In the words of a Porter song borrowed from elsewhere, it’s delightful, delicious, delovely — and, which is part of its charm, delirious, deloopy and a bit delunatic, too.

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Joanne · **Posted:** Fri Dec 20, 2002 3:03 am

Review in the FT.

Quote:

If, like me, you believe that the golden age of musicals didn't begin with Oklahoma! but more or less ended with it, then you long to see more musicals from the 1920s and 1930s. Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins and Cole Porter achieved then for the musical what Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven had achieved in classical music: a perfect balance of elements. Syncopation, melody, wit, rhythm, brio, romance came together in one ideal amalgam after another; the plot was there to support the music; and the musical numbers were the high points.

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And The Telegraph.

Quote:

Trevor Nunn has received endless stick from the serious-minded for staging musicals at this publicly funded address, and even a confirmed tune-and-toe show buff like me felt his habit was getting out of hand with his dreary South Pacific. But hell, the guy is leaving next spring after doing a splendid job for the past five years, and who could begrudge him one last fix of the old razzle-dazzle?

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And The Guardian.

Quote:

Even those of us who question Trevor Nunn's excessive dependence on the musical - by my reckoning, this is the eighth during his five-year tenure at the National Theatre - will concede that this is a headily enjoyable show. Cole Porter's 1934 classic takes us back to the happy days of musical comedy, before the genre was corrupted by its sense of self-importance.

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<small>[ 12-20-2002, 04:17: Message edited by: Joanne ]</small>

Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Sat Dec 21, 2002 2:30 am

National lets its hair down
by Mark Shenton for the BBC website

As director Trevor Nunn's Sophie's Choice continues at the Royal Opera House, his penultimate production in charge of the Royal National Theatre, Anything Goes, has just opened.

After nearly five solid months of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy in the Olivier Theatre, the National lets its hair down on its largest stage for an irresistible 1930s musical end-of-term romp, Anything Goes.

It's also nearing the end of the term of Trevor Nunn's office as artistic director, and for his penultimate production at the helm, he shifts from the frosty philosophy of Stoppard to the frothy fun of Cole Porter.

He must have also found it a light relief to turn to this alongside his nearly simultaneous Royal Opera House première of the new opera, Sophie's Choice.

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Fri Dec 27, 2002 8:31 am

Anything Goes
By Lisa Martland for The Stage

Unlike Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, revived by the National last year, this delightful dip into the Cole Porter catalogue professes to be nothing more than a fun entertainment packed with some of the best popular songs ever written. Trevor Nunn's production does them and their composer proud.

Anything Goes was rewritten during its very first rehearsal period on Broadway back in 1934 but this particular version was initially seen at New York's Lincoln Center in 1987. Writers Timothy Crouse and John Weidman reworked the original, changing the plot and throwing in a few more Porter classics for good measure.

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Joanne · **Posted:** Wed Oct 08, 2003 1:04 am

Review from The Times as the West End transfer run begins.

Quote:

WHEN Cole Porter wrote Anything Goes in 1934, the plot for a musical was little more than a sagging clothes line with the songs hung on it. No surprise, then, that latecomers to the opening night for the West End transfer of Trevor Nunn’s National Theatre revival were ushered in not during the songs but the plot scenes.

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Joanne · **Posted:** Thu Oct 09, 2003 1:33 am

Review from The FT.

Quote:

At the end of Trevor Nunn's production of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes, the audience responded as if it were "a symphony by Strauss, a Berlin ballad, the feet of Fred Astaire", as if it were all those classy superlatives in "You're the Top", just one of its classic songs. When the production was new last December, most critics reacted this way too. Alas, I did not. Still, now that it has transferred to Drury Lane, it's good to report that the production has improved in almost every respect. The famous line "You're the smile of the Mona Lisa" is now wittily acted, and Sally Ann Triplett, as Reno, physically and vocally performing with a new glow of confidence, poured out big phrases such as "Plymouth Rock would land on them" with a fresh-molten dark power that's truly stirring.

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Stuart Sweeney · **Posted:** Fri Nov 21, 2003 1:19 am

<img src="http://www.dancing-times.co.uk/Pics/dancetoday/200311/cover.jpg" alt="" />
Devilishly Good
Two West End Shows, another in the pipeline, a class full of students, and one choreographer – Stephen Mear. How on earth does he cope? For Dance Today Alison Kirkman went to find out

Stephen Mear is the man of the moment in London’s West End. He is the choreographer of Anything Goes, which recently transferred from the National Theatre, where it opened last December, to the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, and also of the new musical, Tonight’s the Night, which opens on November 7 at the Victoria Palace.

Stephen was born in Loughborough and moved to London to train at London Studio Centre in his late teens. He now lives in Walthamstow with his mother and father. ”I invited them to live with me because my dad wasn’t very well. We’re very close.”

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