STRATFORD, Ontario--If fun can be pure and wicked at the same time, thatpeculiar strain of delight defines the Stratford Festival of Canada production of Cole Porter’s madcap musical “Anything Goes.” It is pure Porter, which is to say wickedly stylish.

Is it possible that “Anything Goes” first saw the lights of Broadway 70 years ago? Change a few lyrics, adjust the hemlines and this rollicking show, this incredible potpourri of great tunes, could have been written yesterday. But then, who would want to alter a line, hem or otherwise, in Porter’s urbane, edgy farce about love on the loose and gangsters on the lam?

“Anything Goes” isn’t so much a story as it is a sparkling parade of smart numbers. Sure, there’s a wacky storyline about a gaggle of characters assembled on an ocean liner — the rakish young Billy Crocker, the chanteuse Reno Sweeney (Crocker’s longtime pal, though she would gladly be more), the stodgy British aristocrat Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, the American debutante Hope Harcourt (Lord Evelyn’s betrothed but also Crocker’s heartthrob), the stowaway gangster Moonface Martin. The show simply plays on its characters and their farcical situations to set up Porter’s fabulous songs. And in Stratford’s production, the best are well entrusted to the company’s first lady of song, Cynthia Dale. More than a terrific singer, Dale is a natural comedian with a sense of timing that comes through in both body English and the spoken kind.

It seemed that every time Dale strutted into another lyric — in classics such as “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top” (with the suave Michael Gruber as Billy Crocker) and “Anything Goes” (with the whole company) — this show came to a stop. But the funniest number involving Dale, “The Gypsy in Me,” also tapped into the comic mastery of Laird Mackintosh as Lord Evelyn, who suddenly pops his collar buttons in a display of passion for the sexy singer.

Director-choreographer Anne Allan makes expansive use of an effective unit set that’s transformed from bar to ship’s deck to shipboard theater. If Allan’s tap-dance demands overextended the company’s collective skill in the prolonged “Anything Goes” finale to Act I, that rough moment scarcely mattered amid the songs and laughter that buoyed this show, end to happy ending.

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