Entertainment

Anything (still) goes!

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For a show that’s a hit parade in itself — “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “It’s De-Lovely” and the title song — “Anything Goes” nearly didn’t.

Set aboard a London-bound oceanliner, Cole Porter’s merry little musical ran into an iceberg just two months before it opened in 1934: a fire aboard the real-life SS Morro Castle that took 137 lives.

Even with a burgeoning star like Ethel Merman at the prow, the shipboard farce seemed sunk.

Yet “Anything Goes” opened to giddy reviews. Countless stage, TV and film versions later, it’s just sailed back to Broadway in a Roundabout Theatre Company revival helmed by Kathleen Marshall, with a book by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman. Here’s a look back at one of the ditziest, de-loveliest musicals ever made.

ALL HANDS ON DECK

“There are so many versions of this show,” Marshall says. “The only thing they have in common is they take place on a boat and have ‘Anything Goes,’ ‘You’re the Top’ and ‘I Get a Kick Out of You.’ Everything else is completely different.”

The idea came from producer Vinton Freedley, the Harvey Weinstein of his day, who put together a surefire package: score by Cole Porter, big-name cast and book by Britain’s Guy Bolton and P.G.

Wodehouse of “Jeeves” fame, then the highest-paid writer in the world.

Then the Morro caught fire off the New Jersey shore, at Asbury Park.

“A key element of the plot was a fire aboard ship,” says Crouse. “And Freedley couldn’t get them to rewrite. He had a chunk of the score, the actors were signed, the theater booked — and he didn’t have a script.” Freedley turned to his director, Howard Lindsay, and told him to do it.

“Lindsay said, ‘I can’t do this myself. I need someone to help me,’” Crouse recalls. “And that turned out to be my father, Russel.”

Porter came to Lindsay’s apartment and someone brought in a neighbor’s out-of-tune upright piano. “Cole played them a lot of songs, but not the title song,” Crouse says, “because they didn’t have a title yet.”

At first the show was called “Crazy Week,” then “Hard to Get,” then “Bon Voyage.” (“I liked ‘Crazy Week’ myself,” says Weidman, who has written the books of several Sondheim shows.)

The new writers had yet to drum up a second act, and the cast kept asking them what was going to happen. Someone — Marshall thinks it was the leading man, William Gaxton — yelled, “At this point, anything goes!”

Which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad title. The song came later.

“I think they wrote the new book in two weeks, if that,” Crouse says. “They wrote the last scene on a train up to Boston, where it was trying out. They begged their friends not to come. But they came and had a great time, and so did a lot of other people.”

When “Anything Goes” opened on Broadway on Nov. 21, 1934, The Post sent both its theater critic and “one of its best news reporters” to the Alvin (now Neil Simon) Theater, where “celebrities dotted the crowd like raisins [in] a rice pudding.”

Noel Coward was there and professed himself “delighted with the music.” So were average New Yorkers like Dr. J. Burstan of The Bronx:

“Mrs. Burstan and I think it’s splendid all the way through . . . Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I like to laugh in the theatre.” The doctor wasn’t alone: The Post’s John Mason Brown deemed it “the best straight musical comedy this town has seen in many a good season.”

“You always wonder what it was like to hear these standards for the first time,” Marshall muses. “Did people know, when they heard ‘You’re the Top’ and ‘I Get a Kick Out of You,’ that they’d become classics?”

WHO’S THAT GIRL?

She’s the top, all right: She’s Reno Sweeney, the star of the ship — the evangelist turned nightclub singer. Huh?

“Legend has it that Howard Lindsay went to lunch at the Algonquin and thought he saw the famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson,” Weidman says. “He asked someone and they said, ‘No, that’s a nightclub singer.’ Lindsay went, ‘Hmm, evangelist, nightclub singer

. . .’ and Reno Sweeney was born.”

Merman played her onstage, on film and in a 1954 TV version that tweaked the plot and tamed the lyrics: Rather than the kick of cocaine, it was a sniff of perfume.

But Crouse and Weidman have stayed true to Porter’s original.

“We wouldn’t presume to change a word,” Weidman says, “and we wouldn’t want to.”

“It’s as if you bought a landmark house,” Crouse adds. “You put in new plumbing and wiring, but you don’t mess with its structural integrity.”

The two friends and Harvard classmates revamped the book in the mid ’80s at the urging of Crouse’s mother, Anna, Russel’s widow.

Their version — the one now starring Sutton Foster and Joel Grey — first played Lincoln Center in 1987 with Patti LuPone. In making it, they jettisoned pages and pages of ’30s dialogue, and added songs from other Porter shows, like “Friendship” (“It’s the perfect blendship!”) from “DuBarry Was a Lady.”

Still, the song everyone knows best — the one that’s always sung — is “You’re the Top,” Porter’s much-parodied compendium of all that was rich in the ’30s: a Waldorf salad, a Bendel bonnet . . . Ovaltine.

Porter also tips his hat to Jimmy Durante’s nose and “the eyes of Irene Bordoni.”

Irene Bordoni?

“She was a famous performer at the time,” Crouse says.

“Emphasis on ‘at the time,’”

Weidman says. “We just figured she had beautiful eyes.”

POSTSCRIPT

“Anything Goes” was the start of a beautiful friendship and quarter-century of collaboration between Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Their teaming yielded such great shows as “Red, Hot and Blue” and “The Sound of Music” — it also provided a name for Timothy’s sister, the actress Lindsay Ann Crouse.

And Porter? In 1937, he was riding horseback on Long Island when the horse fell, rolled over on him and crushed his legs. After years of agony, Porter let doctors amputate his right leg. By then, it was 1958 — and, as far as anyone knows, he never wrote another song.