It is easy enough to dismiss a comedy with music as not to be taken seriously, the plot just an excuse for the music. I know people who think that Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutti” is just that: a farce about feigned infidelity that the viewer puts up with so as to enjoy the wonderful music. My own opinion, not at all unusual, is that the plot delves very deeply into the nature of the relations between men and women and does not decide whether their differing roles in courtship are the result of nature or nurture, but does insist that women are not given enough credit for seeing through the men they deal with. But what if a comedy with music is indeed just a confection designed as a platform for its songs? Does that mean that a musical comedy has no meaning in the sense of a heavy moral unless it is Rodgers and Hammerstein pushing their ideas about racial tolerance? I want to pursue that question about a musical comedy that is clearly a romp, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”, and suggest that what it puts together, if you consider its various devices of construction, is a kind of utopian community that makes the metaphysical parameters of our lives less confining. The audience might prefer to live in that condition even if only for the duration of the performance and in our memory of the performance, it adding a little lightness to what was described in “Singing in the Rain”, another of those musicals about nothing, as “the drabness of our lives”.