ABSTRACT
The classic musical comedy Anything Goes is a mashup of musical comedy, 1930s gangster movie, screwball comedy, and social satire. The List Song goes way back, further than Gilbert & Sullivan in the 1890s, though Gilbert was great at it. A great list song delivers clever surprises and often laughs, but it also does the character and plot work any good theatre song should do. The “old hymns” reference may be a joke about how many drinking songs were set to the music of hymns because those tunes were already well-known. A list song operates impressionistically, giving the audience an impression or sense of the characters and the milieu of the story, asking the audience to draw conclusions, to put the puzzle pieces together. The best list songs work on two levels at the same time, with jokes and funny references on the surface, and a mosaic of rich social and political commentary underneath. Porter was the master.
