A Classic Musical Returns to Downtown Garland
There is something particular about watching a full Broadway musical staged a short walk from the Garland Square, in a room where you can actually hear your neighbor laugh. That is the experience Garland Civic Theatre delivers this month when it brings Anything Goes to the Granville Arts Center Small Theatre at 300 N Fifth Street — one of the more intimate performing spaces in the city’s arts complex.
The production runs across five performances this October, opening Friday, October 10 at 7:30 p.m., continuing with a matinee on Sunday, October 11 at 2:30 p.m., then returning the following weekend with an evening show on Friday, October 16 at 7:30 p.m. and two performances on Saturday, October 17 — a matinee at 2:30 p.m. and an evening curtain at 7:30 p.m.
Why ‘Anything Goes’ Still Works
Cole Porter’s 1934 musical has outlasted several Broadway revivals for a reason. The score is relentless in the best possible way — “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “You’re the Top,” and the title number among the songs that audiences recognize even before the cast has fully settled into a scene. The story itself, a farcical romp aboard an ocean liner where mistaken identities and romantic entanglements pile up at an improbable rate, gives a community cast room to play broad and physical without losing the sophisticated wit Porter embedded in the lyrics.
For Garland audiences, the Small Theatre setting at the Granville Arts Center is worth noting on its own terms. The intimacy of the space means that staging a large-scale musical there demands real craft — sight lines are close, and there is nowhere for a performance to hide. Garland Civic Theatre has been staging productions in this facility long enough to understand how to use that proximity rather than fight it.
Garland Civic Theatre’s Place in the Community
Garland Civic Theatre is a volunteer-driven company, which means the people performing on that stage on October 10 are largely neighbors — residents of Garland and the surrounding area who have put in rehearsal hours around day jobs and family schedules. That amateur-in-the-original-sense quality, people doing this because they love it, tends to produce a particular kind of energy in a room. The audience is often rooting for the cast in a way that a touring professional production rarely earns.
The company operates under the umbrella of Garland Arts, the city’s performing arts organization that manages the Granville Arts Center complex. That relationship gives Garland Civic Theatre access to a proper theatrical facility — lighting rigs, wing space, a functioning fly system in the larger hall — while keeping the programming rooted in local talent and local audiences.
The Granville Arts Center as a Cultural Anchor
It bears saying plainly: the Granville Arts Center at 300 N Fifth Street is doing a lot of work this October. A quick look at the month’s calendar shows the Garland Symphony Orchestra occupying the building on October 16, the Dallas Ballet Company arriving on October 18 for Les Danses d’Automne in Brownlee Auditorium, and the Natyaveda Indian Classical Dance Group performing Aparajita (Devi Mahatmyam) on October 25. That is four distinct productions, representing orchestral music, ballet, Indian classical dance, and musical theatre, cycling through the same address within a three-week window.
For a mid-sized city of Garland’s scale, that density of programming is notable. It also means that if you live anywhere near downtown Garland and have not made a habit of checking what is happening at the arts center on a given weekend, October is as good a moment as any to start.
Planning Your Visit
Anything Goes plays the Small Theatre, which is the more modestly sized of the Granville Arts Center’s performance spaces — appropriate for the community theatre scale of the production, and worth knowing if you are driving in and trying to orient yourself on arrival. The address for the full Granville Arts Center complex is 300 N Fifth Street, Garland, TX 75040.
Performance dates again: October 10 at 7:30 p.m., October 11 at 2:30 p.m., October 16 at 7:30 p.m., October 17 at 2:30 p.m., and October 17 at 7:30 p.m. Ticket and booking details are available through the Garland Arts website. If you are planning to attend the October 16 or October 17 Saturday evening performances, keep in mind that the Garland Symphony’s Gershwin concert falls on the 16th as well, which may put some pressure on parking and the surrounding area near the arts center.
For a city that takes its arts programming seriously, Anything Goes is a fitting title for a month that has managed to pack a Broadway musical, a symphony, a ballet company, and an Indian classical dance troupe onto the same calendar — and into, largely, the same building.
