Before the curtain goes up on Anything Goes, you can spot that conductor Stephen Ridley is wearing a captain’s hat – it peeks out from the pit as the friskily jubilant overture gets up a head of steam and you can make a fair guess: no trick will be missed in this show.
Cole Porter’s 1934 classic is a glorious antidote to the months we have struggled through, a reprise of the Tony award-winning Broadway production choreographed and directed with comic verve by Kathleen Marshall. It’s held together by a fabulous central performance from the American star Sutton Foster as Reno Sweeney. She appears wrapped in gold lamé like an expensive chocolate, and in I Get a Kick Out of You confesses that “everything else leaves me totally cold” with the warmest of smiles. Once her feelings are not returned, she brings new enunciation to the old song – the precision of disappointment. The unflappable glamour and stillness at the heart of her performance holds the audience rapt.
The transatlantic liner is magnificent, with three chubby funnels at an angle – as if saluting – and several decks (designer: Derek McLane). The company sways along to Bon Voyage and a seagull swoops overhead (blink and you’ll miss it). In You’re the Top – the greatest of all Cole Porter’s lyrics – images elope with one another at full tilt: the gorgeous, hyperbolic compliment competition is on. But no young swain can beat Reno at her game. By contrast, Samuel Edwards is gauche Mr Ordinary as Billy Crocker – his singing voice sometimes fuzzy at the edges, not equivalent to his finely tuned acting. Robert Lindsay’s Moonface Martin, gangster disguised as cleric – complete with dog collar, gin-croak and expression of lugubrious repose – is a hoot of a stowaway.
Nicole-Lily Baisden’s Hope Harcourt is also the top: when she dances, her body expresses what she is unready to speak. And when she sings Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye it is with a moving simplicity that simultaneously allows the song to be tongue-in-cheek. Felicity Kendal brings febrile comedy to Hope’s squealing, pooch-loving mother, Mrs Evangeline Harcourt, and Haydn Oakley excels as Hope’s intended, bilious Lord Evelyn Oakleigh – an English nincompoop. In the absurd song The Gypsy in Me, Oakley reinvents himself as a matador with much preposterous, flamenco-style shoulder twitching. Carly Mercedes Dyer’s Erma delivers Buddie Beware to admonitory perfection as a good time/bad time girl – from a lifeboat.
Sutton opens the second half with Blow, Gabriel, Blow in soaringly episcopal style, and it turns out not to be the case that anything goes: only first-class performances will do. The orchestra is on point: poised and pacy, and this period piece proves as fresh as ever, with PG Wodehouse’s voice still discernible among all the revisionists of the book on board. Throughout the show, there is a demob-happy feeling – in cast and audience. It is exactly what the captain ordered.
The Young Vic is celebrating reopening with Ben Okri’s Changing Destiny, an adaptation of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian poem, The Tale of Sinuhe, about an Egyptian royal guard in flight from a crime he did not commit: the murder of a pharaoh. Sinuhe is a refugee who becomes king of a foreign land. This brief epic, elegantly directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, is a two-hander with Ashley Zhangazha and Joan Iyiola. Architect David Adjaye’s set is spectacular: two interlocking pyramids, a screen for faces, hieroglyphs and flames, with a tent beneath.
Sinuhe is played by Zhangazha or Iyiola (a game of rock, paper, scissors settles Sinuhe’s gender for each performance). On the press night, Zhangazha brought impressive gravitas to the part, while Iyiola played his spirit and other roles sympathetically. In his programme essay, Okri suggests, intriguingly, that the poem is a progenitor of Greek tragedy, but oversells its contemporary relevance. It is true that the question of what happens when the spirit becomes detached from the self might have mileage today, but it is under-explored here. Okri’s portentously written play is not easy to follow: there is nowhere near enough signposting, not enough flesh on ancient bones.
Star ratings (out of five)
Anything Goes ★★★★★
Changing Destiny ★★
Anything Goes is at the Barbican theatre, London, until 31 October
Changing Destiny is at the Young Vic, London, until 21 August
