Our critic Mark Shenton on a real crowd-pleaser from overture to curtain call...

Anything Goes (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane)
"It's delightful, it's delicious...it's de-lovely": Cole Porter wrote his own review in the lyrics to one of the endless parade of hit tunes you can hear in this frothy, escapist musical.

Trevor Nunn's shipshape new production was first seen at the National Theatre last Christmas, and has now set sail across the Thames to dock triumphantly in Drury Lane and rejuvenate the West End.

There is only one cloud on the horizon, and that's the absence of veteran actor Denis Quilley who appeared in it on the South Bank: he died of cancer just two days before this production re-opened.

But the show must go on, and it does - with overwhelming confidence and tremendous panache.

tangled improbabilities

Low note: veteran actor Denis Quilley died before the production re-opened

When it was originally written, it was supposed to be about an ocean liner getting shipwrecked, but when a passenger ship really did sink, the story had to be hastily re-written.

Now, instead of the ship going down, the plot goes overboard.

The tangled improbabilities mount up amid a series of mismatched romances between a nightclub singer and a stockbroker and a debutante and an English gent, plus a minor gangster (Public Enemy Number 13 is his sad boast) and his moll.

unflagging energy

But it's all just a peg on which to hang a parade of tall girls, low jokes and songs like Easy to Love, All Through the Night, I Get a Kick Out of You and Blow Gabriel Blow that are by turns romantic and ravishing, sardonic and sassy.

The cast, led by Sally Ann Triplett and John Barrowman, are uniformly tremendous, and execute Stephen Mear's showstopping choreography with an unflagging energy that threatens to blow the roof off.

This is a staging as slick and sleek as they come and a real crowd pleaser from overture to curtain call.

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Take a Thames Tour of Rotherhithe including the home of London's whaling and timber trades

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