Song, Dance and Big Talents at Sharon Playhouse

A new start at The Sharon Playhouse: No more Chekhov with three actors to each part. No more  unique casting for hallowed musicals. No more “Death of a Salesman,” as one totally tone-deaf company scheduled years back to start the season.    

No. 

What summer audiences in this part of the world crave are musicals, you know songs, dance, a little vaudeville, a lot of wit.  Like “Anything Goes.” This piece may have gone through many rewrites since 1934, but the season opener at The Sharon Playhouse is still the sly and vastly entertaining play first dreamed up by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. Only now, after numbers of rewrites, there’s tap dancing, sequins, Cole Porter lyrics and music, sailors with mops,  girls of careless virtue, a few snipes at class peculiarities,  a pleasantly vaporous plot and a dog named Cheeky.

 Of course there’s the girl, a debutante; there’s the boy, a broker proudly earning $35 a week; and there is a gangster who employs a machine gun to wipe out all the pigeons in a skeet shoot on the deck of the good ship SS America; a cleric (sometimes two), an English lord with ambiguous sexual leanings and a onetime evangelist-turned-night club performer. That would be Reno Sweeney, played by Amanda Lea Lavergne, an actor who holds the stage, no matter what else is going on.  And it’s not because she has a gaudy, revealing and shiny new costume for every scene change either. This  redhead has sleek lines, great timing, a big voice and she  taps  marvelously, all loose-limbed, tough and bold. 

Director Alan M-L Wager keeps everything moving at a tremendous pace which is both stylish and wise. There’s no time to mull over questions that surface now and then such as Porter’s lyrics with a line that references a Mrs. Ned McLean who went to Russia, why we do not know. (More interesting than that, she was the last private owner of the Hope diamond and its attendant  misfortunes, but of course Porter’s lyrics have surged on to the next smart phrase.)

The fellow with a machine gun (in a violin case) is Moonface Martin, chagrined by his lowly ranking, 13, on the list of public enemies. Paul Kreppel plays the role with every vaudeville tick he can summon. The girl and the boy, Amara Haaksman as Hope and Caleb Albert as Billy, are wildly in love, but she is wildly ambivalent, too, because Hope is engaged to Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, played by the huge and masterful Edward Miskie.

Following the decades-long  practice at the playhouse of casting talented locals in small roles, Monte Stone plays the Reverend Henry T. Dobson and Bill Morris, the enthusiastic Yaley, Elisha J. Whitney.  Emily Soell (a playhouse regular and chairman of the board) appears, as Evangeline Harcourt, anxious to see her daughter, Hope, marry Lord Oakleigh as a means of  securing her own finances.

Among the many gifted cast members is Seana Nicole as the insatiable Erma with four sailors ever in tow. Clearly sex makes the world work right.

And at last Cheeky, played raucously by Mallie Lavergne, is the one undisciplined member of the cast. This is a very small, very fierce dog in the care of Evangeline. It is clear that Cheeky, in Soell’s arms, does not care for audiences and barks into the bright lights, forcing Soell, now and then, to foist the little character off on someone in the wings.

The two acts move swiftly and at the end, like a final exhilarating shuffle of puzzle pieces, every character ends up in the right spot with the right person.

 “Anything Goes” plays at the Sharon Playhouse through July 1. Among the several writers who updated this jolly show from  time to time were Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse, Timothy Crouse and John Weidman.  The excellent choreography here is by Justin Boccitto (If anyone got soaked in the first row or two during the MacHaydn production of “Singing in the Rain,” he’s the fellow responsible); the  set design, clever to look at and swift to move about, is by Jason Myron Wright; and the very slick orchestra was led by Ben Kiley. 

For tickets and information, call 860-364-7469.