When Daniel Goldstein was asked the direct “Anything Goes” at the Goodspeed Opera House, he didn’t feel “anything goes” about it. He had conditions.
“I refused to do it with an all-white cast,” Goldstein recalls. “That was my mandate. Also, I wanted the band to be onstage.”
Goldstein’s sitting at a large table in Goodspeed Musicals’ Scherer Library in East Haddam. With him are two of the lead players in the Goodspeed’s current production of Cole Porter’s classic cruise-ship musical. Rashidra Scott, who’s taking a leave of absence from playing Janelle in the Broadway production of “Beautiful,” plays a pop chanteuse of a different era, Reno Sweeney. Stephen DeRosa, seen recently in Connecticut as the aggrieved father in the Shakespeare/Beatles mashup “These Paper Bullets!” at the Yale Repertory Theatre and in a star-studded staged reading of “The Music Man” in January at the Yale University Theater in January, is playing the comical gangster Moonface Martin.
It’s a lunch break during a Thursday rehearsal, but rather than unwind and chill in the library, the trio seems intent on bringing the snappy pace, raucous laughter and lyrical grace of the show to the interview.
DeRosa, sees no need to get serious, not even for a second. “Musicals of the 1930s were made to bring joy,” he theorizes. “Nobody went into the theater for psychoanalytical realism.”
“Anything Goes,” he argues, “came out of a vaudeville tradition. The closest thing to it today would be ‘Family Guy,’ or ‘The Simpsons’ — bring silly for the sake of being silly.”
Goldstein, who has helmed five other shows at the Goodspeed before this one, jokes about wanting to end this irrepressible musical comedy with a “slow fade to black, the cast just staring,” in the manner of sober modern dramas.
The Goodspeed production is using John Weidman’s 1980s adaptation of the original Howard Lindsay/Russel Crouse/Guy Bolton/P.G. Wodehouse script. Weidman’s version, deemed “cleaner in terms of storytelling” by the director, has become the accepted standard. But Goldstein knows Weidman and consulted with him about a tricky point or two. When it was suggested that some Asian stereotypes in the show’s final scene were over-the-top, Weidman had already fixed that concern with rewrites for a British production.
“These are archetypes that go back to commedia,” DeRosa says. “The Harlequinny character, the sassy woman …” DeRosa watched some Marx Brothers movies to get in the mood for his similarly scurrilous, yet lovable Moonface Martin character, and also drew from his experience playing Eddie Cantor in the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.” Goldstein gave Scott a crash course in screwball comedy, giving her videos of “His Girl Friday” and “Bringing Up Baby” to watch.
Scott, who’s had little experience with “classic” musicals — besides understudying in a revival of “Finian’s Rainbow,” her Broadway resume consists of “Hair,” “Avenue Q,” “Sister Act” and now “Beautiful” — is enjoying how Goldstein “gives us freedom to explore. I’ve worked with directors whose logic is very ‘Plant yourself and speak.’ They literally will stand there until you do what they said.”
The Cole Porter score for “Anything Goes” contains such timeless hits as “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “It’s De-Lovely,” as well as the luminous torch song “All Through the Night.”
DeRosa, who notes that the staging would have been pretty formulaic in the ’30s, when “nobody cared what your character’s motivation was,” agrees that it’s nice to “be given the freedom to have fun in a comedy, that spontaneity.”
For Goldstein, “having fun with each other” is part of the process. “Not pretend fun. Not ‘I’m smiling at you because I’m supposed to be having fun now.’ I hate when I see that. I don’t believe you’re having fun.”
No pretending here, even in rehearsals. “The other day,” Scott recalls, “I forgot I had a line because I was so busy laughing.”
‘Fast And Furious’
With such sincere silliness, rehearsal has been spent mainly on getting the comic timing exactly right, “trying something a hundred times,” Goldstein says, “until we figure it out.
“It’s all about the rhythm, the rhythm of farce. Fast and furious. The momentum has to be so fast-forward that the music of the text rings true.”
There are other energies at work as well. Goldstein, Scott and DeRosa all agree that there’s a soulful, evangelical power in songs such as “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” Scott nabbed the role of Reno Sweeney, Goldstein says, not by singing a Cole Porter standard, but with an “amazing” rendition of the Patti Austin version of the Ella Fitzgerald hit “Mr. Paganini.”
The “Anything Goes” orchestra, visible at the back of the ship-shaped stage area, is working with traditional punchy pop-music arrangements. The costumes are designed by Ilona Somogyi, whose work has been seen at regional theaters throughout Connecticut (including the recent “Romeo and Juliet” at Hartford Stage) and in New York (“Clybourne Park,” “Nice Fish”); she is making her Goodspeed debut.
The costumes, Goldstein explains, are “true to the period, not true to musical theater. They’re delicate. There’s a texture and weight to them.” DeRosa marvels that “they’re real-looking 1930s clothes, and every designer wants to do ’30s clothes because they’re the best.”
When asked if DeRosa gets to wear a funny hat in his gangster guise, Goldstein simply says “Duh!” and the mirth-filled conversation continues. When Goldstein says proudly that he’s made all the principal performers tap dance in the show, DeRosa says “…if I still have ankles! That’s how they’ll remember me: ‘Old Leg-Brace’ DeRosa! ‘Cankles’ DeRosa! ‘He tried to tap dance.'”
“We’re all in the same place with this,” Daniel Goldstein declares. “We all want to do a big romantic screwball comedy.”
Goldstein: “There’s no sense of cynicism in this work.”
DeRosa: “And back then, they had every reason to be cynical.”
Scott: “It’s just delightful. Lovely.”
Who could ask more from “Anything Goes”?
“ANYTHING GOES,” with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and book by John Weidman, Timothy Crouse, Guy Bolton, P.G. Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, directed by Daniel Goldstein, is at the Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam through June 16. Performances are Wednesday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., with added Sunday evening performances on April 17 and 24 and May 1 and 8. Tickets are $34 to $84. Information: 860-873-8668, goodspeed.org.
