Anything Goes is a 74-minute studio recording of a historically informed version of Cole Porter's musical, starring Kim Criswell, Jack Gilford, Cris Groenendaal and Frederica von Stade, performed with the Ambrosian Chorus and the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of John McGlinn.

Several of the show's original orchestrations had been lost, but McGlinn was able to recreate them at least approximately by soliciting the help of Hans Spialek, who, together with Robert Russell Bennett, had composed them.

Spialek reproduced his and his colleague's work of half a century earlier as well as he was able to; the few passages that he left incomplete on his death were finished by Russell Warner and by McGlinn himself.

[1] Andrew Lamb reviewed the album on CD in Gramophone in December 1989, comparing it with recent cast recordings of stagings on Broadway[2] and in London.

They were recordings of a production (common to both CDs) in which the musical's book had been reworked and its score reorchestrated, and into which numbers from other Cole Porter shows had been inserted.

As he explained in the lengthy booklet accompanying his CD, his disc was the fruit of musical archaeology in which he had dug up orchestrations from the show's birth in 1934 that had been lost for several decades.

Kim Criswell was in no way inferior to Broadway's Patti LuPone or London's Elaine Paige, and Cris Groenendaal likewise was the equal of his counterparts.

McGlinn had been "inspired", too, when he had turned to the elderly Jack Gilford for the character part of Moonface Martin (although Pinnacle's Bernard Cribbins also deserved praise for his "clearly projected" version of the role).

In sum, the RCA and Pinnacle discs were rewarding mementos of the production that they documented, and people who had last heard Porter's show in theatres in London or New York might find McGlinn's way with it initially disconcerting.

As Reno Sweeney, the musical's most important role, Kim Criswell sang with "verve and clarity, but also with tones that too often become strident and whiny".