The Way They Used to Make 'Em

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Broadway has been aching for years for a splashy, razzle-dazzle, old-style American musical. Last week the main stem got its wish -- not once but twice. The only hitch: Cabaret dates to 1966 and Anything Goes to 1934. So their joyous returns do not prove that theater people know how to make 'em like they used to. What these revivals do display is a corps of talented Yanks who can design, direct, choreograph and perform with all the panache and pizazz of the Britons who of late have dominated the musical stage.

Anything Goes begins and ends -- in this production, literally -- with Cole Porter, whose extraordinary score is the one reason to bring back this sweetly silly show. As the lights dim, his reedy voice is heard intoning the title tune. At the curtain, after a pleasure cruise through the likes of You're the Top, Friendship and It's Delovely (the latter two lifted from other Porter shows), a giant lighted-up portrait of the composer-lyricist, who died in 1964, descends to smile benevolently.

If Porter really were to lend approval, it would be chiefly for Patti LuPone. As Nightclub Belter Reno Sweeney, she rivals the role's originator, Ethel Merman, in volume and clarity of voice, and far outdoes her in intelligence and heart. CoStar Howard McGillin has shirt-ad looks, puppyish charm and a lilting tenor. Other delights: Tony Walton's Art Deco ocean-liner set, Paul Gallo's seascape lighting and Michael Smuin's crisp choreography. The supporting cast is mostly ordinary, and Kathleen Mahony-Bennett's oomphless ingenue is not even that. The book, by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton but revamped before the 1934 opening by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (Life with Father), has been timidly updated by John Weidman and Crouse's son Timothy. It is still so stale and inane that it wheezes of summer stock. But the difference between Porter and other composers remains -- well, night and day.

Cabaret has to compete not only with the memory of its first production, which won eight Tony Awards, but with Bob Fosse's 1972 film adaptation, which many critics rank as perhaps the best movie musical of all time. Hal Prince's fluid, expressionistic staging has been so widely imitated that even its slyest devices seem cliched. Although the show's political anthems and music- hall satires throb with emotion, its love ballads are mostly lame -- a weakness that has been heightened by Joe Masteroff's miscalculated rewrite of his own book. Clifford (Gregg Edelman), the American novelist who arrives in Berlin as the Nazis are coming to power and through whom the story is told, is now unmistakably homosexual. His affair with the hoydenish singer Sally Bowles (Alyson Reed) has no chance of changing his orientation. Thus his fate no longer rests in her unsteady hands, and when she aborts what may be his child, she has not thwarted a lasting romance.

Yet the show overleaps these obstacles to deliver entertainment of shocking power and perverse pleasure. Where Anything Goes laughs off the financial turbulence of the early 1930s -- its plot involves a stock-market mistake that engenders a fortune -- Cabaret dwells on the ugliness brought out by that era's economic panic. Neighbors turn into enemies. A hymnlike melody subtly alters into a fascist anthem. Leering and strutting and cackling over all is Joel Grey, reprising the performance that won him a Tony and an Oscar, as the emcee luring visitors into a nightclub -- and a nation -- succumbing to political insanity. At these moments, Cabaret seems as daring and relevant as a stage musical can get.