With ‘Anything Goes,’ Anything’s Possible--Even West Coast Dates

When it comes to road shows, the rule of thumb is: Anything can go--the stars, the sets, the dates--right out the window. For the national tour of the Cole Porter revival “Anything Goes,” all of it went.

On Sunday, as widely reported, the anticipated 18-month tour of up to 70 cities--launched 3 months ago by New York City’s Lincoln Center Theater at a cost of more than $2 million--will close in Pittsburgh.

Goodby, Tampa. So long, St. Louis. Never mind, New Orleans. Miami, forget it.

And what of Costa Mesa, where “Anything Goes” is scheduled to arrive in September for a 1-week engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center? As one report had it, the booking is “up in the air.”

Which is entirely understandable but “entirely wrong,” according to both the New York producer’s tour manager and the Center’s Texas-based theatrical booker.

Question: Can the dead walk?

Answer: They can, if they’re not dead.

“The tour will be reconstituted,” Eugene V. Wolsk, general manager of the “Anything Goes” road show, said in a telephone interview. “It’s virtually certain it will come to the West Coast. The only thing up in the air is under what auspices, what combination of producers. And it’s possible there will be some changes in the cast.”

Miles Wilkin, president of PACE Theatrical Group, the Houston company that imports and co-produces the musicals for the Center’s Broadway Series, is just as sanguine.

“I’m totally convinced the show will be there in Orange County,” he said in a separate interview. “That’s what I’ve been told definitively by the New York management. I’m even willing to provide financing, if that is necessary. The tour is not dead. It is going on hiatus.”

Question: What’s the difference between being dead and being on hiatus?

Answer: Rethinking the production.

Wolsk and Wilkin, echoing Lincoln Center Theater’s executive producer Bernard Gerstein, both argued that elaborate sets rather than negative notices were the tour’s undoing.

“The critics were not the acid test,” said Wilkin, who planned to bring the show to 24 of the cities on the tour. “The truth is, if the physical production were not a problem, the show would still be running.”

The sets of the 1934 musical, which were designed to duplicate the smash-hit revival currently in New York, are so large and complicated that short engagements became unfeasible. Wolsk said it took too much time to dismantle the physical production on a Sunday in one city and reassemble it for an opening on a Tuesday in another city.

“The tour was predicated on one-weekers,” he noted. “We discovered--after the fact--that we could not play one-weekers.”

On such miscalculations whole empires were lost. Napoleon made the same mistake when he thought he could get in and out of Russia in a hurry.

Still, it is hard to get around the notices.

“Basically miscast, misspoke and misdanced” is how the Boston Globe led its review when “Anything Goes” bowed in Boston in November on its second stop. (The first was New Haven, Conn.)

Leslie Uggams--reprising Patti Lupone’s starring role as Reno Sweeny (originally created by Ethel Merman)--”sings fine but she seems to be doing a club date rather than a musical,” the Globe said. “And unlike Lupone, Uggams simply can’t dance.”

Co-stars Rex Smith and Rip Taylor also came up short. Smith “misses the 1930s style by about 3 decades,” said the Washington Post, when the show bore its wounded to the National Theater in December.

Question: How did Napoleon solve his problem?

Answer: He didn’t, but he wasn’t in show business.

One tactic being discussed for “Anything Goes” is to scale down the sets, or in Gerstein’s word, retool them. But that is intended chiefly for the 1-week engagements, Wolsk said.

So all those Orange County theatergoers who blessed the day the Center was built because they wouldn’t have to drive to Los Angeles for full-scale Broadway musicals are in for a slight disappointment.

“Orange County could get a somewhat scaled-down production because of its short run,” Wolsk said. But the show is scheduled to open first in Los Angeles and “will come with the same sets they’re using now” in expectation of a multiweek run (at a theater yet to be determined).

Center-goers have seen such adjustments before--with “Cats,” for instance. Presumably, there will be no downsizing of “Into the Woods” when it arrives at the Center in March after playing at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles (beginning Wednesday). If that were to happen, Center management ought to begin downsizing ticket prices.

Meanwhile, the producers of “Anything Goes” have batted around the idea of asking Uggams to do the show in New York and Lupone to do it on the West Coast, Wolsk said. The trouble with that, he added, is that “nobody has ever broached the idea with either Uggams or Lupone.”

In any case, he is willing to bet that the tour will resume soon in the Midwest. “It’s not determined where, but it could be Chicago in 6 to 8 weeks,” he said. “We’ll do 8 weeks there, and then the coast.”

That is one of the other rules of thumb when it comes to road shows: Don’t go to Chicago in the winter.

BACKSTAGE: Ground will be broken for the Irvine Theatre in March--not in January, as theater officials had hoped. Douglas C. Rankin, general manager of the theater operating company, said Monday that he is “90% certain” the official ground breaking for the $17.6-million arts facility will be March 4.

Wednesday, a crew will start fencing in the construction site on the UC Irvine campus, Rankin said.

COCTEAU NOTES: The Alternative Repertory Theatre company in Santa Ana has delayed Jean Cocteau’s “The Eagle With Two Heads” by a week. It will open Feb. 17 (instead of Feb. 10). “We couldn’t put together a cast in time,” spokesman David Palmer said.

ART’s three readings of “Glory Road,” by Long Beach playwright Tim Tondreault, will be staged as scheduled at 8 p.m. Wednesday and again Jan. 18 and 25.