1990

Murray Bramwell talks to Geraldine Turner and Simon Burke, stars of the revival production of Anything Goes, Cole Porter’s hit musical from 1934, which opens its Adelaide season at the Festival Centre tonight.

Cole Porter might well have been a character in any of the more than fifty musicals and movies for which he wrote hit songs. Wealthy, stylish, smart, he embodied the kind of chic that epitomised New York in the ’30s and ’40s. But a crippling horse riding accident in 1937 and a series of more than thirty operations culminating in a leg amputation, turned him into a recluse. By the time he died in 1964 he was as alone and tragically disillusioned as a figure from a novel by F.Scott Fitzgerald.

Born in 1891 in Peru, Indiana, Porter was a scion of the Cole family who had made a fortune from coal and timber interests. At Harvard to read law, Porter soon shifted his studies to the School of Music. It was also at Harvard that he met Monte Woolley, who later become famous as an actor in films such as The Man Who Came to Dinner. Woolley, a leader in the gay sub-culture at the time, introduced Porter to the New York high life. Alan Jay Lerner once said of Cole Porter that he was “a homosexual who had never seen the closet.”

In Europe when World War 1 broke out, Porter joined the Foreign Legion but his time was spent performing songs for the troops rather than at the front. After the War he settled in Paris where he met and married socialite Linda Lee Thomas. They remained together in convenient harmony for 35 years until Linda Lee’s death in 1954. They had much in common – both scintillated in fashionable society and both had buckets of money.

“I prefer going through life in paper clothes and icy rooms,” Cole Porter once said, refering to his liking for impeccably tailored lightweight lounge suits and haughtily tasteful apartment decor. When he moved into the Waldorf apartments on Park Avenue he spent a cool quarter million on redecoration and when he had to stay in hotels for out of town try-outs for his shows he would routinely take a selection of paintings from his priceless art collection to hang on the walls. Chain-smoking, gourmandising and sipping a martini or Amer Picon, Porter was the incurable epicure. “Cole is the most self-indulgent man I have ever known,” his friend Moss Hart once remarked, “but indulgence and pleasure stop the moment song-writing begins.”

Success as a song writer did not come immediately for Porter, however. His first show, See America First sank after only 15 performances in 1916. He had to wait more than ten years for recognition, but when the musical, Paris opened in 1928 he was made. The hits began -all with the familiar Porter hallmarks, courtly romantic lyrics, bristling with wit and topicality that echoed Ogden Nash or even W.H.Auden, and melodies, memorable as they were elegant.

“First I think of an idea for a song,” Porter once explained to an interviewer, “and then I fit it to a title . Then I go to work on a melody. Then I write the lyric- the end first, that way it has a strong finish. It’s terribly important for a song to have a strong finish. I do the lyrics the way I do a crossword puzzle. I try to give myself a metre which will make the lyric as easy as possible to write without being banal. I try to pick for my rhyme, words of which there is a long list with the same ending.”

Anything Goes may have been the hit musical of 1934 but before it opened it was fraught with problems. Originally, the producer Vinton Freedley had commissioned a musical about a group of characters on a pleasure cruise who get shipwrecked. The highly successful writing combination of P.G.Wodehouse and Guy Bolton had produced the book and the show was well under way.Then, just two months before opening night, the SS Morro Castle, returning from a luxury cruise to Havana, caught fire and sank off the coast of New Jersey causing the loss of 125 lives.

Tact and respect demanded that the show had to be changed, but with Wodehouse and Bolton in different parts of Europe, Freedley brought together Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who not only altered the story, they continued to work together producing the books for Life With Father and The Sound of Music. Their play, State of the Union, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945.

When Anything Goes opened at the Alvin Theatre in November, the first-night audience included Mary Pickford, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, George and Ira Gershwin and Mrs William Randolph Hearst. Ethel Merman played Reno Sweeney and William Gaxton played Billy Crocker. Gaxton is also said to have casually remarked during rehearsal -“In this kind of spot, anything goes”- and so the show, still untitled a month before opening, is said to have got its name.

Geraldine Turner is no stranger to the musical stage- her credits include A Little Night Music, Guys and Dolls, HMS Pinafore and Sweeney Todd and in the eighteen months since Mike Walsh’s Hayden Attractions production of Anything Goes opened, she has won the Gold Mo award for Music Theatre Performer of the Year and one of the show’s nine Victorian Green Room Awards as Best Actress in a Musical.

Turner is quick to identify the reasons for the show’s critical and audience success. “Firstly, Cole Porter’s score. When you think of musicals, especially of the last fifteen years usually they have one or, sometimes,two hits. In Anything Goes, song after song is a hit. I thought the show would be for those maybe,forty and over but even young teenagers adore it. Songs like I Get a Kick Out of You, You’re the Top, Anything Goes, Blow Gabriel Blow- they all seep into your knowledge, even if you weren’t alive at the time. People keep recording them because they are so good.”

“The show is wonderful visually. Roger Kirk has designed a fantastic set which is very simple and I have fourteen glamorous costumes. I think the 1930s were the height of style in fashion. There are three big dance numbers including a huge tap number . Anything Goes, which closes Act I, is a real show-stopper and Blow Gabriel Blow is reminiscent of the big MGM musicals of the ’40s. But all these things fall flat unless the performances are great- the show is sung very well also.”

“I see the script as a cross between the Marx Brothers and a Bob Hope- Bing Crosby -Dorothy Lamour Road movie- really corny gags one after another. It looks like we are just having fun but in fact it’s difficult to do because it has got to be fast and well-timed. There’s not a lot of content in it. It’s not that kind of show. It’s a good night’s entertainment. All you’ve got to do is make the commitment to go along with it.”

“The show is a tribute to Cole Porter- his photograph is brought down at the end of the show. When it opened in America in 1987 Anything Goes was the first Cole Porter musical to be staged on Broadway in nearly thirty years. There are interesting things in the show . It opens not with a big production number but with dialogue and then a song -I Get A Kick Out of You. It’s a great song of course- in fact it is said that Porter was so tired of his friends arriving late to his shows that he decided to put his best song on first.”

“The songs are topical to 1934. In You’re the Top, Porter refers to cellophane and Mickey Mouse which were very new at the time. There are references to the Depression also- “I was there when he jumped” In 1934 that would have got a big laugh in the theatre.”

The show closes with the Adelaide season and Geraldine Turner is looking forward to resuming her concert career and making more recordings -she has strong followings in New York and London . “Playing Reno Sweeney has been a highlight of my life,” she notes,” but a long run with eight performances a week takes it out of you. Our director, Philip Cusack,says musicals make you old and I think it’s true. It’s our job to make it look easy, but it ain’t.”

Co-star Simon Burke, who plays Billy Crocker, is the first to agree. “There is so much to do. I’m hardly off the stage the whole night. It’s a great responsibility – for Geraldine as well. Philip Cusack once said during rehearsal -`It’s her show but it’s your story.”

“I couldn’t think of anything harder than what I have to do in this show. I think it is harder than Les Miserables which was considerably dificult- completely sung and running for three hours.

“Musicals are undervalued and it cheeses me off a bit. I remember being interviewed by someone in Melbourne recently who was looking through my credits and said `OK you are doing this show but when are you going to do some real acting again ?’ I can see the point, an audience comes in and sees people having fun singing a few songs and go home again. But the demands of keeping that fresh for 400 performances, making the comedy absolutely meticulous, getting some gutsiness and truth into the soppy 1930s love story and trying to sing it beautifully every night- I’ve done Shakespeare, new Australian plays, leads in feature films and Play School- and I reckon this job is the hardest I’ve had.”

“As comedy the show is a work of art. It’s hard to get it right but once it is, it plays like clockwork. It’s wonderful to have the audience in stitches and then go out and sing a beautiful ballad or see the tapping. Sometimes in the middle of singing You’re the Top, which I’ve done close to 400 times, there’s this fantastic big band arrangement behind me ,I’m singing it with Geraldine- and I think we do it well- and I think this is great. I really enjoy it.”

Looking ahead, Burke also is ready for a change after eighteen months with Anything Goes. “It is an interesting time for me professionally. I left my roots in subsidised theatre to do Les Miserables and with this, it has taken three years out of my life. Now I’ve got a singing career which I don’t want to turn my back on because it is something I’ve always wanted. At the same time I’d really like to do something quite dramatic- a film maybe, or something quite off the beam.”

“I’m pleased we are finishing Anything Goes in Adelaide,” he muses, “It’ll be nice to be in a new place after playing double seasons in both Melbourne and Sydney. Having worked in Adelaide a bit I think the show will go down really well there. I think it will finish with a bang.”

“A Kick out of Cole Porter” The Advertiser, June 2, 1990, p12