A year on, and after a partly recast tour, Anything Goes’ SS America drops anchor back in the Barbican and in style. Actually feels even better than before. Aboard are Cole Porter’s champagne rhymes, Kathleen Marshall’s grand direction and peerlessly witty comic choreography, moments of 1930s romantic elegance for those with a tender nature and PG Wodehouse’s high-absurd plot for the rest of us. Last year it loomed out of the grey Covid fog like a sunburst, and had us on our feet. Same again.
‘Offers spectacle & wonder in every musical number’: ANYTHING GOES – Touring & London
Featuring Oliver Award-winning talent in the form of Denis Lawson and Simon Callow, as well as musical theatre royalty such as Kerry Ellis and Bonnie Langford, this energising performance of Anything Goes offers spectacle and wonder in every musical number.
’It runs like clockwork’: ANYTHING GOES – Touring ★★★★★
The West End hits central Edinburgh this week, as Cole Porter’s seaborne musical Anything Goes sails into the Festival Theatre for a very limited run until this Sunday.
NEWS: Rachel York & Haydn Gwynne join the cast of Anything Goes at the Barbican & extra dates added
Broadway star Rachel York and Tony and Olivier nominee Haydn Gwynne will join the cast of critically-acclaimed Anything Goes for the final weeks before the show must end on 6 November 2021.
‘Making a splash’: Anything Goes – Barbican / Singin’ in the Rain – Sadler’s Wells
Two classic revivals — both coincidentally first launched in the spring and summer of 2011, one on Broadway (Anything Goes, in a production directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall), the other at Chichester, before transferring to the West End’s Palace Theatre (Singin’ in the Rain, directed by Jonathan Church with choreography by Andrew Wright) — have returned in triumph on consecutive nights this week.
‘The roars of joy kept coming’: ANYTHING GOES – Barbican Theatre ★★★★★
In Anything Goes at the Barbican there are celebrity gangsters and torch-singers, big stock-exchange money and big energy, jazzy lapdancers and a touching belief that poor old England is best represented by a silly-ass in tweeds who doesn’t understand words like smooch.
NEWS: Further casting & new schedule is announced for Anything Goes at the Barbican Theatre
Anything Goes will open at London’s Barbican Theatre from 23 July 2021 for a strictly limited 12-week season until 17 October.
NEWS: On the Town now opens to press this week with Jacob Maynard as Chip
Last Thursday’s press performance of On The Town at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London was postponed at short notice due to incapacity of one of the leads. The theatre has now issued the following statement.
An injury in On the Town
Fred Haig must have thought that this was his year after landing starring roles in two of the big musicals of the summer but during Monday evening’s performance, he sustained an injury to his foot which has now been confirmed as a fracture.
NEWS: The Space announces their next season
Over in Canary Wharf, The Space Theatre might not necessarily be one that is on the radar of many London theatregoers but the announcement of their summer season ought to tempt the theatrically curious out East as it is full of goodies, not least a revival of Mike Bartlett’s excellent Contractions.
XANADU – Southwark Playhouse
Southwark Playhouse’s recreation of Xanadu is a fabulous, over-the-top, well-staged entertaining evening. Everybody leaves smiling and the enthusiasm is genuinely deserved.
WICKED – Touring
With a focus on Glinda and Elphaba, Wicked inverts and twists the story about the witches of Oz and, in a spectacular and poignant way, reveals an alternative perspective to the characters and our perception of good and evil. Glinda, forever loveable but not always ‘good’, becomes a character who is redeemed through her experience and the ‘Wicked’ Elphaba, endearing and resolute, struggles in a society where she is perceived as different.