@ King’s Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 25 Apr 2015

The horrors of a major banking crisis that triggered a global recession is slowly dissipating. The world wants to celebrate, so Cole Porter writes Anything Goes which contains some of his raciest and best-loved songs: I Get a Kick Out of You, All Through the Night, You’re the Top, and the original gay anthem Anything Goes.

The perfectly silly plot of mistaken identity aboard a transatlantic liner, complete with daft disguises, need not detain anyone for a nanosecond. It’s the music and, especially, lyrics of Porter that make this such joyous nonsense that is still fun and fresh 80 years after it was written.

“When every night the set that’s smart is intruding in nudist parties in studios, anything goes” runs the song’s most famous line. It’s the pre-interval showstopper replete with rainbow steps and tap shoe chorus line – who could ask for anything more? The song, incidentally, was written for that great belter Ethel Merman who back in the 30s refused to sing the salty lyrics of one song, a hymn to Catherine the Great’s (rumoured) insatiable sexual appetite: “she made the butler, she made the groom / she made the maid who made the room.” It’s a pity the producers didn’t have the courage to reinstate it here.

Suffice to say there’s an excellent cast. Debbie Kurup does the hard-done-by nightclub singer Reno to perfection; Matt Rawle is a standout Billy and Kate Anthony is his fascinating, vacillating inamorata. The multitalented Shaun Williamson makes for a great Moonface Morton the disguised gangster on the run.

Ten years after Anything Goes (the most revived of 1930s musicals), Oklahoma! (Festival Theatre run reviewed here on The Wee Review this week) gave musical theatre drama and seriousness and Porter’s oeuvre fell from fashion. Now, all these decades on, it’s Anything Goes that’s still crisp and Rodgers and Hammerstein that feel musty with mildew.

Simon Baker’s sound design (and doubtless good diction from the singers) means all of Porter’s glittering bons mots are as clear as a bellboy’s falsetto. Richard Kent’s set is inventively – if vertiginously – rendered as the liner’s top deck as seen from above. Director Daniel Evans has much to be proud of in this intoxicating cocktail: one part ballyhoo to two parts witty sparkle.