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Aug. 20, 2004 Pleasure cruise - 'Anything Goes' is enjoyable despite uneasy lead by Richard Huntington |
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STRATFORD, Ont. - Believe it or not, programmed machines can come in the unlikely form of a delicate, willow branch swaying to the infectious rhythms of a Cole Porter tune. The branch in question is named Cynthia Dale, who plays Reno Sweeney, the sultry center of the Stratford Festival's first production of "Anything Goes."
In this madcap story, Reno is a former evangelist turned hot nightclub singer whose steamy persona routinely turns men into panting ciphers. Exempt from Reno's charms is her friend Bill Crocker (Michael Gruber), who happens to be hopelessly in love with Hope Harcourt (Elizabeth DeGrazia), a debutante about to be married to a wealthy English aristocrat by the name of Lord Evelyn Oakleigh. In desperation, Bill stows away on the luxury liner that is carrying Hope to London and to eternal matrimony with this upper-class stiff (played with hilarious pomposity by Laird MacKintosh). Naturally, Reno is also on board to stir up further farcical complications. It happens that Bill's tycoon boss, Elisha Whitney (Douglas Chamberlain) is making the trip as well, necessitating that Bill assume a string of disguises. He comes on as everything from a sailor in ridiculously short pants to a Spanish nobleman in equally ridiculous fake whiskers. These characters happily highlight Gruber's great ability to appear a silly fool one moment and a convincing romantic lover the next. Among the wackier figures on board is gangster Moonface Martin (Jimmy Spadola), dressed as a parson in order to evade the FBI. Spadola is very funny, but then he does shamelessly milk the part. Erma, a gangster's moll, is played by Sheila McCarthy, a great performer who is miscast as a vamp with a passel of men always clinging to her skirt. The willowy Dale can look like a writhing tendril extracted from an art nouveau vase. Her face can take on the exaggerated melancholy of some delicate damsel out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. She is a fine singer with crystalline high notes and subtle and expressive phrasing. It's a nice refined voice, but one that barely tinkled the chandeliers on the show's most rousing song, "Blow, Gabriel, Blow." I thought I could live with a wistful and wafting Reno Sweeney just because Dale is so pleasurable to listen to and to look at. Designer Patrick Clark helps immeasurably when he makes her the chromatic center of the action by dressing her in a fabulous series of gowns and dresses in reds, greens and flashing gold. Working against - and on - Clark's striking evocation of a 1930s luxury liner (based on the Queen Mary), Dale and this large and energetic cast did indeed create some splendid visual effects. But Reno is supposed to be a femme fatale who incinerates men with a glance. It doesn't happen. In most numbers, Dale looks like she was run through a sophisticated movement analysis computer program before she hit the stage. Her rendition of "I Get a Kick Out of You" is plotted right down to the twist of her pinkies. She's a lovely artificial thing, but totally bloodless. (Dale isn't always this way: I saw her in the festival's concurrent "Guys and Dolls," and she lends to straight-laced missionary Sarah Brown an easy, unencumbered movement.) Director and choreographer Anne Allan was after a sleek, high stylishness, which paid dividends with Gruber and, especially, with DeGrazia, who sings up a storm. Dale just doesn't quite find her own energy. But overall, the production will please anyone who likes to watch a well-polished machine where every dance is in flawless unisonand every dancer right on beat. Allen puts tap at the heart of the show, and the big tap sequences are marvelously entertaining and often comic (as when the old lady in the wheelchair [Gruber] begins to tap). Tap works here like a kind of noisy double emphasis with tapping feet stamping out the rhythms Porter built into the score. It's wonderfully exhilarating: You can feel the clickety-clack rhythms right down to your toes.
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