Photo Flash: New Line Theatre Stages Wacky, Subversive, Satirical ANYTHING GOES

It's 1934 and we're going on a wild transatlantic cruise full of sex, booze, God, and gangsters. Welcome to the S.S. American, where anything can happen, and it usually does.

New Line Theatre, "the bad boy of musical theatre," continues its 27th season of adult, alternative musical theatre, with Cole Porter's satiric masterpiece ANYTHING GOES, running March 1-24, 2018, at, the Marcelle Theater, in the Grand Center Arts District.

New Line returns this rowdy, naughty, subversive masterpiece of musical comedy to its wild, wacky roots, and its stinging satire of Americans' habit of turning religion into show business and criminals into celebrities, along the way skewering Wall Street, Prohibition, the Brits, class, and several other ripe targets. The show is a masterful mashup of musical comedy, gangster movie, screwball comedy, and social satire, because even in terms of form, anything goes!

Cole Porter's amazing score includes "You're the Top," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Let's Misbehave," "All Through the Night," "It's De-Lovely," and many other Porter hits.

Despite its reputation as old-school fluff, Anything Goes is a whip-smart satire of America's "cafe society" (the 1% of 1934), with the steamship S.S. American standing in for Shakespeare's woods, a place with no rules where people find out who they really are and "correct" the mistakes they've made in the world of the City. Anything Goes fearlessly rips open the American psyche and spills it all out onto our stage.

The cast of New Line Theatre's Anything Goes includes Sarah Porter (Reno Sweeney), Evan Fornachon (Billy Crocker), Eileen Engel (Hope Harcourt), Zachary Allen Farmer (Sir Evelyn Oakleigh), Aaron Allen (Moonface Martin), Sarah Gene Dowling (Bonnie), Kimmie Kidd-Booker (Mrs. Harcourt), Jeffrey M. Wright (Mr. Whitney), with Jason Blackburn, Dominic Dowdy-Windsor, Clayton Humburg, Will Pendergast, Michelle Sauer, Larissa White, Alyssa Wolf, and Sara Rae Womack. The show is directed by Scott Miller and Mike Dowdy-Windsor, with musical direction by Nicolas Valdez, choreography by Michelle Sauer and Sara Rae Womack, scenic and lighting design by Rob Lippert, costume design by Colene Fornachon, and sound design by Ryan Day.

Anything Goes contains some adult themes.

Photo credit: Jill Ritter Lindberg

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