‘Anything Goes’ is a show which has always been high on my designer’s bucket-list: the elegance and the decadence of the era combined with the fun and the romance of the writing promi
ses a fabulous show for the whole creative team, the performers, and the audience.
Since the bidding stage I’ve been gathering inspiration material, beginning as usual with googling photographs of other productions and general 1930s fashion. I then expanded my research of the show by browsing the costume bibles and photographs from the National Theatre’s 2003 production of the show at their archives, which included some of the designer’s historical
research and some background of the show. I also looked at other shows with similar settings, in particular the 2014 Broadway revival of ‘On the Town’, as well as figures I could use as inspiration for specific characters, for example Ginger Rogers and Carole Lombard for Reno and James Cagney as Tom Powers in ‘The Public Enemy’ for Moonface. For colour schemes I looked to travel advertisements, especially for cruises, and other kinds of posters fr
om the 1930s. My primary sources for 1930s fashion in general are books, although I have also looked at some original photographs and fashion adverts. Most of the casual costumes in this show are not the kind of thing the characters would have worn on the streets of New York, but fall under the category of ‘leisure wear’ reserved for cruises and days at the seaside. Much of this resembles modern summer clothing – polo shirts, halter-neck tops, shorts, skirts, playsuits, swimsuits – and is much more colourful and comfortable than the smart-casual wear characters of this class would spend most of their time in.
A large portion of my work on a show on this scale is organisational, involving a series of spreadsheets, checklists, and maps of the show. After going through the show working out what each cast member needs in each scene, I then listed every costume in the show (over 80 in total!) categorised as ‘Casual’, ‘Evening’, or ‘Special’. Actually finding all these palazzo pants, evening gowns, and ministerial robes is the trickiest part: all must be bought, hired, or made in the right sizes and colours, all without breaking the bank! Thank god for charity shops.
he numbers from it so thoroughly embedded in popular culture it’s impossible to listen to them without tapping your foot or humming along. Getting the opportunity to work on the score with such a talented cast is a privilege and a pleasure, and I relish the chance to help develop the singing voices of our actors to
Anything Goes is my first Oxford Playhouse show, and as such it has required many more different types of designs – from Bid to Stash to Programme – than its smaller-venue counterparts. Though graphic design is largely a solitary effort, there has been plenty of collaborative back-and-forth between myself and the production team regarding the overall aesthetic of the show. We ended up deciding on something like a 1930s art nouveau swimming pool poster with a tiffany blue palette. Watch out for the posters and hoodies around Oxford in the lead-up to Michaelmas!
Introducing our Stage Manager – Maya Ghose!
Preparations for Anything Goes at the Oxford Playhouse are well underway. In the sound department, we’ve been deciding how to share our microphones between cast members, to make sure everyone is audible in each scene. We don’t have enough microphones for each actor to have their own, so a swap plan is needed in order to seamlessly switch between actors. In addition, we’ve added sound effects to certain scenes to make them sound more realistic, including numerous blast’s from the ship’s stacks.
Anything Goes Oxford 