Anyone Can Whistle is universally acknowledged to be an unworkable musical. A quick failure in 1964 when it opened on the heels of Hello, Dolly! and Funny Girl, it includes a remarkably intriguing score by Stephen Sondheim. But the show—a zanily satiric protest musical targeted, it seems, directly at the folks in the orchestra seats—was, and remains, altogether unworkable. As authors Sondheim and Arthur Laurents repeatedly explained, over the decades, whenever asked.
This enigmatic musical can be wildly entertaining, though, as documented by Casey Nicholaw’s staged reading at Encores back in 2010. Put Donna Murphy, Sutton Foster, and Raúl Esparza in close proximity, you’d imagine, and fireworks are likely to zing through auditorium. As they certainly did.
Last night, MasterVoices brought Vanessa Williams, Elizabeth Stanley, and Santino Fontana together at Carnegie Hall. Anyone Can Whistle still doesn’t work, needless to say. But other than Fontana and—in key moments, Stanley—this Anyone Can Whistle didn’t entertain, either.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
These limited-run staged readings receive minimal rehearsal time. Encores, with five-performance runs and healthy budgets, lavishes significantly more time on their offerings than this Whistle likely had. MasterWorks has, under the same conditions in the past, given us thoroughly admirable looks at Kurt Weill’s Knickerbocker Holiday and Lady in the Dark. But Whistle is a more difficult show to do, with some of Sondheim’s most complex choral work; two major extended production numbers; and Don Walker’s iconoclastic orchestration—no violins or violas but five cellos!—which is not sight-reading friendly. Musical director/stage director Ted Sperling clearly has a thorough understanding of the material, but there’s only so much you can do with a cast of 40, an orchestra of 22, a large choral ensemble, and no time.
Watching the stars, one sensed that the highly accomplished Fontana (a Tony winner for Tootsie) and Stanley (Jagged Little Pill) have been singing these songs for years—in benefits, in classes, and in their dreams of somewhere, someday, playing the roles. Whereas the multifaceted Williams sounded like she’d just gotten the music on Monday. She was able to sing the words, with the help of her ever-present script binder, but hadn’t yet started to consider how to act the role.
Laurents and Sondheim devised Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper as a walking-sputtering-and-singing frying-pan-eyed Hirschfeld cartoon. Take the second line of her bravura opening number: “All of the peasants throw rocks in my presence, which causes me nervous distress.” A line like that can’t come across if you just stand there carefully singing the notes. In her second-act supposed showstopper, “A Parade in Town,” there was a moment where you could barely find Williams onstage within the crowd. Even with her bright yellow pantsuit.
That crowd was emblematic of the rushed and under-rehearsed staging. Choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter (School of Rock) had eight dancers plus the large MasterVoices choral ensemble (of, clearly, non-dancing singers) and way too little rehearsal time to undertake the massive assignment.
The Cora problem was accentuated the moment Douglas Sills, as the crooked comptroller to the crooked Mayoress, came on for their first dialogue scene. Sills crackled while Williams simply read her lines; perhaps he should have played Cora? For that matter, a perfect Cora was standing at the stage right lectern narrating the affair: Joanna Gleason, who likely could have taken over—without rehearsal—and, in the parlance, slayed ’em.
Sitting unengaged at Carnegie Hall, more than a few patrons clearly had a sense of déjà vu. The first full-orchestra New York hearing of the show, at the same site in 1995, was similarly under-rehearsed and disappointing—marred, especially, by the curiously disinterested performance of Madeline Kahn as Cora. This despite the presence of Bernadette Peters, the show’s original choreographer Herb Ross, and narration from the 1964 Cora, Angela Lansbury.
Following the opening performance of the 2010 Encores Whistle, I bumped into the composer (literally) as he rushed out of City Center. He was clearly enthused by Donna/Sutton/Raúl and a performance that crackled with theatrical dynamite. The very fact that the late Mr. Sondheim was not in attendance at Carnegie Hall put a natural damper on the events, performed before a sold-out house including thousands of mourners (and I do not exaggerate). But I imagine his public reaction would have been politely and appreciatively noncommittal as he fled off into the night.
Anyone Can Whistle was presented for one performance on March 10, 2022, at Carnegie Hall. Information: mastervoices.org
