Puzzling Out a New Anything Goes
At BroadwayCon, John Weidman talks adapting Anything Goes
In 1988, writers Tim Crouse and John Weidman (above) undertook a bold project: To update the book of Cole Porter’s 1934 musical Anything Goes (which Crouse’s father Russel had cowritten the book for). “There had never been a first class revival of the show,” Weidman explained at the Broadway Maven David Benkof’s panel with book writers at BroadwayCon. “It hadn’t been on Broadway in 50 years.” But Lincoln Center wanted to produce it.
The challenge was not a small one. In the original production, “there was not anything one would recognize as a book song,” says Weidman. “They were great songs, but everything was kind of its own thing, and the show had kind of a revue-like quality.” That style was simply not going to work in the present-day of 1988: “Audiences would have lost patience with almost entirely.”
At the same time, Crouse and Weidman didn’t want to lose the show to lose its sense of era. “The goal,” Weidman explains, “was to reimagine the musical in a way that would make it feel like it had still been written in 1934, but was paced and organized in a way that audiences had come to expect in 1988.”
In the end, a lot of their work became about “puzzle-solving, moving pieces around,” Weidman reveals. “We found by moving some of the songs in the score around, we could take a song like ‘You’re the Top’ and turn it something that actually felt like a book song, felt like something that needed to be sung at that point because of the crisis between two of the characters. This was true of virtually everything that was in the score.”
Weidman and Crouse also made a point of restoring songs that had been cut from the show over the years. “We felt like we really honoring Porter’s work,” says Weidman.” “At the last curtain call at Lincoln Center in 1988, there was a huge picture of Cole Porter flown in from the flies [and] he got the biggest hand, which he certainly deserved.”
The show would go to win three Tonys, including Best Revival, and did so again in 2011.