#ANYTHING GOES CHARACTERS FREE#

Her artistic vision is colored by parallels she sees in the America of today with the America of the 1930s: the possibility of inventing and reinventing oneвЂ™s self, the reality of celebrity status propelling unsavory characters to the heights of popularity, bafflement at вЂњhow con men can fool most of the people most of the time,вЂќ and other veiled political statements that would not be out of place in an MSNBC editorial segment. Photo: Maria Baranova.ДЄrenaвЂ™s artistic director, Molly Smith, asserts that Washington вЂњneeds a comedy right now,вЂќ but before this audience, which tapped nary a toe to PorterвЂ™s jazzy tunes, one could reasonably ask when it does not. Soara-Joye Ross as Reno Sweeney & Corbin Bleu as Billy Crocker in Anything Goes. A rushed onboard wedding falls apart, uniting the young couples, as well as HopeвЂ™s mother and BillyвЂ™s suddenly super-rich boss, the aging Yale-educated inebriate Elisha Whitney, who was her old flame. American, Billy desperately stows away to rekindle his romance with Hope with the help of the fugitive gangster Moonface Martin, a duo of Chinese Christian converts, and the nightclub singer Reno Sweeney, who loves Billy but helpfully falls for Lord Evelyn during the journey. As they sail across the Atlantic on the luxurious S. Its plot is a fairly ordinary love story of that era: the earnest young stockbroker Billy Crocker goes out of his league to woo the glossy deb Hope Harcourt, whose ambitious mother has aimed her at the dimwitted British aristocrat Lord Evelyn Oakleigh. Now it is the turn of Cole PorterвЂ™s Anything Goes, a hit 1934 musical comedy that bitingly satirized the cult of celebrity trickling out of Hollywood, mocked the mores of the nouveaux riches who had taken a beating in the Great Depression, and, in its famous title song, reveled in a litany of traditional tastes and values turned upside down by the bewildering changes of modern society. In recent years it has presented a My Fair Lady with an Asian Eliza Doolittle, an Oklahoma! with a Latino lead, a Carousel that turned the work into an indictment of domestic violence, a South Pacific that condemned colonialism, and a Cabaret that equated Nazi oppression with complaints about alleged Bush-era civil-rights violations. Soara-Joye RossвЂ™s nightclub singer channeled the best Porter renditions of any singer of any color in the American jazz tradition.ДЄrenaвЂ™s ongoing commitment to presenting a вЂњgold standard musicalвЂќ from that distinctly American genre every season has consciously included multicultural casts, spotlighted вЂњsocially relevantвЂќ themes that may be secondary to (or absent from) the original plot of a work, and sanitized particular lines and characterizations that might be considered вЂњoffensiveвЂќ today. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has just hired a new Vice President for вЂњSocial Impact,вЂќ but no theater in the nationвЂ™s capital has yet signaled more virtue in the direction of befuddled upper-middle-class liberals than Arena Stage, whose mission involves creating an extension of вЂњcommunity.вЂќ

#ANYTHING GOES CHARACTERS FREE#

Theaters seeking вЂњrelevanceвЂќ (and money) eagerly jump on this bandwagon, often in the hopes of attracting audiences more diverse than the standard crowd of elderly white people with the free time and disposable cash that elude hordes of basement-dwelling millennials. Culture, we are told, must be вЂњrelevant.вЂќ But вЂњrelevantвЂќ to whom? In our narcissistic age, the all-too-common answer seems to be вЂњourselves,вЂќ usually meaning the urban creative elites who make it all happen rather than audiences who may or may not share their sensibilities, and certainly not the overwhelming majority of the population, who never have and never will set foot in a theater.

Anything goes characters