‘Anything Goes’ flies high

Chaos flies high in this wacky compilation of tap, slapstick, drunks, hookers, con artists and easy marks, catchy tunes and catchier lyrics. How could it be otherwise?

Fact is, it could be, has been and will be.

I’m talking about a musical comedy slapped together fast, as a replacement for one that was done and theater-ready but had to be scrapped because it would have been in bad taste coming out right after a tragic disaster at sea: the loss of 125 lives when fire broke out on the S.S. Morrow Castle off the coast of New York in 1934.

I’m also talking about Civic Light Opera and Cole Porter and “Anything Goes.” It’s showtime spectacular.

Picture a knockout of a streetwise mama and her bevy of play-for-pay cuties. Put the mama on a manhunt and have her target an English aristocrat with his nose in the air and his head in the clouds. Engage the aristocrat to a sticky sweet debutante who’s got a nosy mother looking over her shoulder and who is in love with a slick, fast-talking salesman, of a personality that can charm the birds right out of the trees.

Also, add in a petty crook on the lamb with his beauty-for-brains girlfriend, a millionaire businessman who leers and lusts after anything in skirts and a couple of stowaway clowns consciously crafted after the Marx Brothers in “The Night at the Opera.”

Now, load them all up on an ocean liner, London-bound from New York in the 1930’s. Discipline as best they can be disciplined with a perfectly proper ship’s captain and crew. And sit back, relax and enjoy what has got to be the zaniest mix-up of all time of memorable music and lyrics, jack-in-the-box surprises, exaggerated melodrama, Broadway chorus lines, screwy one-liners and outright funhouse insanity. Director, Teresa Thuman, done seen the light and got the spirit.

Headlining Sabrina Prada belts out an “I Get a Kick Out of You,” the equal of Sinatra’s. And Prada’s duet with Carter Davis of “You’re The Top,” makes others the bottom.

You could be funeral serious and still not help but laugh at Jeff Pawlick screeching out “Be Like the Bluebird” to get his jail mate out of the dumps. Witness a lyric mutilated, down pat.

The dialogue, the characters, the excuse for a story line, it’s all been done before, and again and again. But not that I have seen like this. This “Anything Goes” gets out the spirit of a musical conceived on the spot by minds letting go. It is natural without being self-conscious, spontaneous on purpose. This “Anything Goes,” goes.