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So Porter wrote his songs about smart, glamorous, rich, sophisticated, sexual people. His lyrics were dripping with French phrases, dirty jokes, references to high society names, new brand names, exclusive night clubs, trans-Atlantic cruises At its core, Anything Goes is a comic but pointed exploration of amorality and moral irony. John Waters would be right at home here. Reno stands in for America in the aftermath of the repeal of Prohibition in the early s — going from moral purity as an evangelist under Prohibition to moral sin as a nightclub singer after the repeal.
Religious references pop up throughout the show, usually revealing religious or moral hypocrisy. And early in the show, Reno comically merges her two sides when she says to the hard-drinking Mr. Ultimately, Hope and Anything Goes chooses love and authentic emotion over money, position, and obligation. Both Hope and the show — and ultimately Evelyn — reject Britain in favor of America. Not your standard musical comedy plot — especially in Is Evelyn an ironic stand-in for the gay but married Cole Porter?
The subliminally gay sidekick was a staple of the Astaire-Rogers movies, though here the character has been considerably fleshed out, and he gets a wife by the end. The relationships in our story are like those in A Little Night Music, in which the characters start with the wrong partners and have to reshuffle before the evening is over.
Though Anything Goes trafficked in smart social satire, it was as horny as it was clever. Fear yields its sovereignty reluctantly to fun. We may sum up the quintessence of the sexual revolution by saying that the center of gravity has shifted from procreation to recreation.
Schmalhausen extolled the virtue of playful sex: Sexual love as happy recreation is the clean new ideal of a younger generation sick of duplicity and moral sham and marital insincerity and general erotic emptiness. Sex as recreation is the most exquisite conception of lovers who have learned to look with frank delighted eyes upon the wonder in their own stirred bodies.
A year later in , satirists James Thurber and E. White wrote the book Is Sex Necessary? One is aviation, the other is sex. Looked at calmly, neither diversion is entitled to the space it has been accorded.
Each has been deliberately promoted. In the case of aviation, persons interested in the sport saw that the problem was to simplify it and make it seem safer. With sex, the opposite was true. Everybody was fitted for it, but there was a lack of general interest. The problem in this case was to make sex seem more complex and dangerous.
This task was taken up by sociologists, analysts, gynecologists, psychologists and authors; they approached it with a good deal of scientific knowledge and an immense zeal.
They joined forces and made the whole matter of sex complicated beyond the wildest dreams of our fathers. The country became flooded with books. Sex, which had hitherto been a physical expression, became largely mental.
The whole order of things changed. To prepare for marriage, young girls no longer assembled a hope chest — they read books on abnormal psychology. If they finally did marry they found themselves with a large number of sex books on hand, but almost no pretty underwear.
This show, its title, and its title song are all about that. Every version of the show starts the title song the same way. The same thing happened in the s and 30s. As the first verse of the song begins, we set up this comparison. In olden days a glimpse of stocking Was looked on as something shocking, But now, God knows, Anything Goes. The androgynous, body-disguising, chest-flattening fashions of the 20s were gone. But think about that phrase — anything goes, anything is okay, nothing is off limits, there are no rules, no norms, no constraints anymore.
Good authors too, who once knew better words, Now only use four letter words Writing prose, Anything Goes. What was Porter talking about here? One U. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell! Finally, when the novel was published in , sixty obscenity cases were brought in twenty-one different states.
It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity. This really was a sea change in popular literature. If driving fast cars you like, If low bars you like, If old hymns you like, If bare limbs you like, If Mae West you like Or me undressed you like, Why, nobody will oppose.
In terms of content, much of this lyric references current events. In , twelve states still did not have any speed limits; it was an automobile wild west. The reference is a joke on the two meanings of the word low. Here the word means disreputable, but also, literally lower in height.
According to a Life magazine article, before Prohibition, bars were inches high, but during and after Prohibition, so many more women were drinking that they lowered many bars to 43 inches. Why else would liking old hymns be subversive like the rest of the items in this list?
It was also the title of a literary magazine that published from Here, the world is just screwed up, backwards, upside-down, disorienting No revival has used those last four lines because no one would understand them today. Jitneys were independent taxi cabs or small buses, so the joke is that the middle-class folks who can still afford to take a cab, here in the middle of the Depression, would be shocked to find out that some of the richest Americans in this case, the Vanderbilt and Whitney families had lost nearly everything — due to the creation of income and estate taxes not too long before, the effects of the Depression, and the weirdly profligate spending of the Vanderbilts and others.
The Whitneys went broke through corruption. Much like right now. And notice this very early critique of the mainstream media According to the PBS website: For the radio, the s was a golden age. At the start of the decade 12 million American households owned a radio, and by this total had exploded to more than 28 million.
News broadcasts influenced the way the public experienced current affairs. When the Hindenburg airship exploded in , reporter Herb Morrison was on the scene, recording the events to be broadcast the following day.
But above all the radio provided a way to communicate like never before. But what of these other lines? We know Porter loved to joke in code In other words, Free Love. It does make a certain Porter-esque sense, both in terms of his writing and his biography. This last version of the bridge was written by P. When grandmama whose age is eighty In night clubs is getting matey With gigolos, Anything Goes.
And Porter rarely inverted sentences as awkwardly as these first two lines. Still, this stanza does get at another cultural phenomenon of the s. While the trend up to that point had been for the divorce rate to increase, that got interrupted in the early s. Unemployment was at its highest in , and as the unemployment rate declined throughout the 30s, the divorce rate increased. Anything Goes! Anything, Anything, Anything Goes!
When Anything Goes first opened, the title song worked because it reinforced a feeling the audience already had — that the world is spinning madly out of control, and that sometimes that can be fun.
Today when we see Anything Goes, all those examples suggest the craziness today, without literally referencing any of it. Crazy is crazy. In , Americans were grappling with the massive, disorienting changes our country was going through. It did feel to many American as if all the rules had been ripped up, that literally anything goes.
Today we grapple with much the same thing, here in the early days of the Digital Age, at the start of huge demographic and social changes in America, when the very nature of truth is up for debate. Today, all these references may serve only as metaphors, but still pretty potent ones. Every element of this story is testament to this one idea, that anything goes. All the couples are wrongly coupled at first, the clergyman gets arrested and the gangster gets a cruise, the passengers deify a fake murderer, the real gangster is as nervous as a cat, the worldly-wise speakeasy hostess falls for the dorky Englishman Everything is up for grabs.
None of the rules apply. Anything goes! Flying Too High with Some Guy in the Sky The richest song in the show is deceptive in the surface simplicity of both its music and lyrics. When this song opens the show, it gives us a false first impression of Reno; but moved to later in the show, it reveals a deeper layer to Reno.
But what exactly is Reno saying here? And it really is sad. She feels nothing. Nothing thrills her. Nothing moves her. Except one thing — the face of the man she loves. So why the goofball Sir Evelyn Oakleigh? He finds an undeniable joy in the adventure of life. Like her underworld circle of friends, Reno has seen it all So she asks the obvious question — if literally everything leaves her cold So tell me, why should it be true, That I get a kick out of you?
Each verse takes an addiction alcohol, drugs, and adrenaline all of which do nothing for Reno. The bridge expands on the title phrase — I get a kick every time I see You standing there Before me. Notice the rhyme compounding, giving us a sense of momentum. We get the string of see, me, me, -ly, me, but also before me and adore me.
And yet none of the grammar is awkward or strained. The last verse follows the established pattern, but this time the music literally takes off with the lyric, and the multiple rhymes give us even more momentum Fly- ing too high with some guy in the sky Is my i- -dea of nothing to do.
But I get a kick out of you. Remember that passenger airplanes were really new at this point, and only rich folks could afford to fly — the first passenger jet, the Boeing , was introduced one year before Anything Goes debuted.
And Lindberg had made his historic trans-Atlantic flight only seven years earlier. One of the most interesting aspects of this song is how it changed when it was lifted out of context. Originally, Porter wrote that title phrase to a rhythm that almost no one sings correctly today. Once you hear it the right way which you will in our production , the other way sounds so wrong. Why is that funny? Nobody can tell the difference between a bishop and a gangster. Welcome to America. And no one notices.
Two of our three heroes, Reno and Mooney, have phony religious alter-egos. Mooney spends much of the first act running around the ship in full preacher drag, stealing things and brandishing his Tommy gun. She says to Mr. Come, let us lead them beside distilled waters. I kind of like the guy. Moon: But Reno, you promised Billy. Reno: Thou almost persuadest me to shoot the works. And in comic counterpoint to her fake piety, the exchange ends with her threatening sex!
And these two fake religious figures, Reno and Mooney, will lead the comic revival meeting in Act II. And by the way, why do we want Gabriel to blow his horn? So are these drunk, hard-partying passengers really cheering on the Second Coming — and the Apocalypse? For Bonnie, heaven is a party. After all, how could heaven be boring? Notice throughout the lyric how Bonnie blends together traditional religious symbol with her own secular ones.
This song is originally from another Porter musical, so the reference to portals in the first line is just a happy accident in this story set aboard a ship. Only by being In the Know can you enter Heaven. But here, that Secret Knowledge is a new dance. Then, like lots of other pop songs in the s and 30s, Bonnie introduces a new dance, by giving us the choreography. The reference to St. And why not? Or is Bonnie just assuming that St.
Similar, but different ideas It starts with humility and reverence: When the angels play low On their harps of gold, Kneel and pray low, But the sacred is immediately short-circuited in favor of the profane: Then get up and shake your halo! Again, act like an angel play a harp, kneel and pray , then act like a jazz baby shake your halo.
First a humble act, then a show-off act. Reno and Velma were both based on Texas Guinan, after all Finally, after many calls for a confession, Billy makes one and is immediately arrested.
And then the same thing happens to Mooney. In this world, religion is broken. Those lyrics had to be revised for the revivals. Porter as a lyricist loved metonymic things, particularly lists. On the one hand, these lists frame a particular kind of eroticism — they most often appear in songs of romance however ambivalent and employ potentially endless wit, since the list could hypothetically continue to exhaustion, in the service of courtship.
Even when some brief excavation securely identifies a reference, it takes a great deal of time to unpack the halo of associations that are compressed around it, and that time is the death of wit. But though the wit be diminished in explication, the richness that comes from reconstructing the social network condensed into a single reference offers a different set of rewards.
Contrary to what a lot of directors and actors think, it is not important for the audience to get every reference; but it is important that the actors get them, so that they can live fully and honestly in this world. That sense of reality is the real value of period references.
Take a look particularly at the juxtaposition of these pop culture references against each other, in their context. Porter is doing some really subtle, sophisticated social commentary in many of these lyrics. While rye is the traditional whiskey of choice, other commonly used whiskeys include Canadian whisky, bourbon, blended whiskey, and Tennessee whiskey, invented in the early s at the Manhattan Club.
Thompson in , and became infamous during the Prohibition era. The comic strip character Dick Tracy was named for this term.
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