STAGE REVIEW : Revival of ‘Anything Goes’ Fails to Kick In Energy of 1930s

Until a couple of seasons ago, “Anything Goes” was a creaky 1930s musical that would surface whenever Ann Miller or Ginger Rogers felt like doing a tour. They didn’t make you forget Ethel Merman. They didn’t even make you remember Ethel Merman. Nobody did, until Lincoln Center mounted a first-class revival of the show for Patti LuPone in ’87.

Without imitating Merman, LuPone evoked her--the young, dauntless Merman, with the voice that went to your head like nose drops. And suddenly it was clear what “Anything Goes” must have meant to Broadway audiences during the Depression: a signal that we weren’t down yet.

The national company of Lincoln Center’s “Anything Goes” arrived at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Tuesday night, headed by Mitzi Gaynor. (Actually this is the second try at a national company: The first, starring Leslie Uggams, went belly up last fall.) The signals here were not about vitality.

One message was that an opening-night audience will work like crazy to persuade itself that it is having a good time. Especially when abetted by a star who knows all the tricks, as Miss Gaynor obviously does. For instance, she favors the device of the elongated freeze at the end of the number, so that the listener feels he has to keep applauding. If I’m applauding, I must be enjoying myself, right?

Yes and no. This version of “Anything Goes” does offer some pleasure, even to those people who may not be fans of Miss Gaynor. First, those fabulous Cole Porter songs: “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “All Through the Night,” and on. They have nothing to do with the plot (which does not exist), but they retain their quality, and at least one performer sings them idiomatically.

Not Miss Gaynor. As Reno Sweeney--a combination of bad girl and revivalist (Texas Guinan meets Aimee Semple McPherson) --Miss Gaynor has no edge at all. That’s not to say that she doesn’t dance and sing a lot, and it’s not to say that she misses her marks. It is a trim, professional performance. But there’s no bite to it, and Reno has got to have a bite, or what’s she doing in the story?

Oddly enough, Miss Gaynor does evoke a great star of the 1930s. But it’s a star who never would have been cast in a randy Cole Porter shipboard romance featuring gangsters and hip flasks: Shirley Temple. This is our Shirley all grown up and spunky, but still not above sticking a finger in her cheek. “Isn’t she adorable?” somebody said of Miss Gaynor at intermission. She is, and ageless too--all the things it says about her in the program.

But her presence returns “Anything Goes” to its interim state as a vehicle for ladies who used to be in the movies, instead of a true revival--a production that restores a show to its first energy.

Too bad, for without that energy “Anything Goes” is revealed as a bag of excruciating vaudeville routines separated by some golden oldies. The book used here isn’t the original one, but it matches the original one in its stupidity, at which we are supposed to laugh--dreadful gags about gun molls, alcoholic Yale men, ministers who are really mobsters and Chinamen who play craps.

The one faintly amusing notion is that this cruise ship is so hungry for celebrity passengers that it will gladly settle for Public Enemy No. 13. And the one faintly charming character is a skinny young stockbroker who stows away to be close to the girl of his dreams.

Call it the Jimmy Stewart role. It’s nicely played and exceptionally well sung by Scott Stevensen, in exactly the light baritone voice that would have been assigned “All Through the Night” in the days before theater amplification, a voice that’s rangier and stronger than it seems.

Richard Sabellico also does well as a twittish English lord who predictably falls in love with the tough-talking Reno Sweeney. You have just about written off the role and the performer when Sabellico takes Miss Gaynor in hand in a mock-Gypsy number and makes her pay attention to him rather than the audience. Impressive.

Dorothy Kiara also attracts the right kind of attention as a girl who keeps running up to the crow’s nest to attend to the needs of the sailors. It’s an awful, demeaning part, but the actress orders it about with the contempt that LuPone did the role of Reno Sweeney. Maybe Kiara will someday get to play that role.

Director Philip Cusack and choreographer Tom Mahoney keep the nonsense going at the proper clip, with some holes for dropped cues (the show is still very much on a shakedown cruise), and the ensemble looks cheerful and young, which is half the battle.

Tony Walton’s luxury-liner set doesn’t seem as clever on a proscenium stage as it did when it was presented in the half-round at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre. And it would be a good idea to project a photo of Cole Porter on the curtain at the start of the show, to explain why we’re listening to a scratchy old record of someone singing “Anything Goes.”

At 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2. Ends Sunday. Tickets: $19-$40; (213) 480-3232 or (714) 480-3232.