Anything Goes by Reboot

Leave it to me to find earnestness in a show written by Cole Porter, of all people, and produced by Reboot Theatre Company, but find it I did.

It came out blazing right away with powerhouse Kat McFadden as Reno Sweeney doing amazing work on I Get a Kick Out of You, You're the Top (partnered with Mackenzie Malhotra's Billy Crocker), and Friendship (partnered with Rolando Cardona-Roman's Moonface Martin.) The program says McFadden once played Maureen in Rent. I would have loved to have seen that.
One number followed another. The choreography was cute and entertaining, but all through the first act, I kept asking myself, where is the tap. Like Marvin the Martian asking, where's the ka-boom?
Then came the ka-boom. The tapping in the titular number, Anything Goes, at the end of act one with Harry Turpin's choreography, as carried out by the cast, swept me away. The shoes chattering in perfect time with the band, the hands darting, the faces popping. The crowd, of course, went nuts.
It took me to a timeless place. Here we all were, a century after the show premiered, doing it all again, just like the first time. The artists producing beauty and joy for the pure love of it and gifting it to me and everyone else in the Theatre Off Jackson.
This is where the earnestness comes in. Reboot seems always to approach the old shows it produces with a subversive eye (though Anything Goes comes kind of pre-subverted, think.) The idea is not to undermine, mock or parody, but to see what could be tweaked, modified or zhuzhed to just give a good show, dammit, to a present-day Seattle audience. And the other night, they did.
(Photo from Reboot's Facebook page)

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