DIRECTOR'S NOTE
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) was the culmination of their revolutionary push to integrate much more fully the book and the score. The goal was to stage a musical with songs that furthered a cohesive plot and also developed character. For generations, audiences have undersood the integrated Broadway musical as the norm. Consider how “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” in Les Mis provides insights into the character of Marius or how “A Boy Like That” complicates and propels the plot of West Side Story.
Cole Porter’s Anything Goes (1934) predates the integrated Broadway musical by almost ten years. Of course, the songs, the dance, and the action work together, but are not incorporated in a way that audiences since the 1940s have become accustomed. Part of the magic of Anything Goes is that it invites the audience into its historical moment: Broadway of the 1930s. With references to Greta Garbo and Jimmy Durante, Fred Astaire, Irving Berlin, and Mae West—all in one song—Cole Porter places his lyrics squarely in the contemporary moment of the 1930s. His music, too, is very much in the fashion of the period. We have sought to enhance the show’s sense of period in the choreography and the costuming. The acting, too, followed the contours of Porter’s distinctive stylized dialogue, which exemplifies a 1930s theatrical sensibility.
Anything Goes is very much a 1930s musical and it is in the context of its own historical moment that we will find its great charm and beauty. However, the show also deploys 1930s stereotypes of Asians, which in 2017 are counter to our understanding of race and diversity. The humor of these elements derives from an audience’s unconscious investment in these stereotypes, which is simply no longer the case. So, while the overarching directorial strategy has been to preserve the original sensibility of Anything Goes, I have also sought to minimize the dated caricatures of Asians. I have been judicious and careful in this effort.
