This weekend’s staging of “Anything Goes” by the Perry High School Drama Department showed how fully the department’s director, Randy Peterson, has succeeded in developing the talent widely and broadly among his student actors.
While PHS senior Bryce Eastman delivered a first-rate performance as the sexy evangelist turned nightclub singer Reno Sweeney, some half-dozen other crucial cast roles were played with equal strength, from the star-crossed lovers Hope Harcourt, played by senior Mollie Moorhead, and Billy Crocker, played by senior Sebastian Hernandez, to the more two-dimensional roles brought to life with hilarious effect by sophomore Riley Sergent as the eccentric Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, senior Tony Roe as the third-rate gangster Moonface Martin and senior Orlando Gonzalez as the lovesick lush and Yale booster Eli Whitney.
While Cole Porter’s music and lyrics in “Anything Goes” have made memorable additions to the classic American songbook — from the title number to “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “You’re the Top” and others — the story admittedly has some notable formal weaknesses, from a little too much of punning and wordplay to a plotline sometimes so tenuous that it seems to be merely an excuse for the choral numbers.
The musical comedy has not aged gracefully in other ways as well, and it is hard not to wince at some of the threadbare stereotypes — of the Chinese, for instance, or of the gender roles. On the other hand, the opportunities to hate Ivy League snobs or canting hypocrites or grasping social climbers are perennially in season.
The show’s subversiveness is still looked on as something shocking. From sex pot Erma’s travesty of the Lord’s Prayer, expertly rendered by junior Kyla McKenzie, to the second act’s opening with a paean to gangsterism and closing with Evangeline Harcourt, well played by senior Cassidy Hibbert, narrowly avoiding having to prostitute her daughter — all show the nihilism of H. L. Menken and the sex mania of Sigmund Freud in the wake of the Wall Street crash and demonstrate how easily Weimar Germany could turn to Hitlerism and the United States to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s social democracy, all ultimately issuing in the porno capitalism in which we dwell today, when anything’s gone.
The 17-piece pit orchestra played superbly under the conducting of PHS Instrumental Music Director Blaine Schmidt. The vocal music direction by Jenn Nelson and choreography by Nicole Friess-Schilling made perfect use of the unique strengths of the PHS departments.
