Caroline O’Connor carries the ship, but too much is lost overboard.

Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
September 8, 2015

Cole Porter’s depression era, ocean-going musical tonic has had more makeovers than a society matron since it set sail in 1934 complete with Ethel Merman and enough hit songs to sink a battleship. Over the years, and mostly for the 1987 Broadway revival, PG Wodehouse and Guy Bolton’s book has been snipped and contorted to fit a more streamlined narrative, but despite the importing of a few non-original songs, a redistribution of others (Hope originally got The Gyspy in Me and Reno Buddy Beware) and the removal of a certain amount of chorus material, the madcap tale still sports a healthy sense of the 1920s excess it sought to rekindle in leaner times. And of course it has Porter’s joyously subversive lyrics, more enervating than that often referenced “sniff of cocaine”. It’s a pity then that Dean Bryant’s leaden-fisted direction for Opera Australia fails to capture any of that intrinsic sense of subversive permissiveness, or the lightness of touch of the original.

Not that it doesn’t have many of the required constituents for a good night out – those fabulous...