When the Arthur Laurents-Stephen Sondheim Anyone Can Whistle opened at the Majestic Theatre on April 4, 1964, it had already racked up 12 previews and went on to play eight more performances. Closing on April 11 after generally unwelcoming reviews and mounting bad word of mouth, it logged 21 performances.
I report these details to say that of those 21 perfs, I saw two. I returned because choreographer Herbert Ross had staged a spectacularly hilarious dance in each of the two acts. To this day I consider the sequences among the best ever.
Tony nominators must have agreed. When the season’s nominees were announced, the only one Anyone Can Whistle received was for choreography. Ross didn’t win, but it may be that the run was so short, not enough Tony voters were able to catch up with it.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
I’ve gone on at length about the little known or celebrated Ross triumphs (apparently, they weren’t filmed) to mention that this week’s one-night MasterVoices Anyone Can Whistle concert didn’t include anything resembling Ross’s work. JoAnn M. Hunter used a few dancers nicely, but that’s hardly the real thing.
When Sondheim was helping to prepare the 2010 Encores! ACW revival, he told David Ives, charged with the tweaking, that concert versions should concentrate on songs while keeping the script to a minimum.
Wise words, certainly when it comes to this backward glance. Laurents’ book is described best as a fable that’s anything but fabulous. The plot is so garbled that it’s best gotten out of the way for what is strongest—aside from Ross’s contributions: Sondheim’s score.
Cora Hoover Hooper (Vanessa Williams) is the corrupt mayoress of a bankrupt town. She decides a Lourdes-like miracle could work. A local rock suddenly spouting water does the trick. Only this is no miracle: Police chief Magruder (Michael Mulheren) is behind the rock, pumping.
At the same time, nurse Fay Apple (Elizabeth Stanley) wants to obtain spouting-rock tickets for the 49 inmates at The Cookie Jar, the sanatorium where she works. She’s denied the tix, and the Cookies escape, mingling with the supposed sane town denizen. To differentiate them from the crazies, a doctor, J. Bowden Hapgood (Santino Fontana), arrives and falls for Nurse Apple, who attempts to seduce him in the guise of a French seductress.
Oh, what’s the use going on with the limply wagging tale? It never makes sense. Among other things, Laurents can’t keep Nurse Apple’s behavior straight and, ultimately, Hapgood never distinguishes who’s nuts and who isn’t. (Sondheim is on record admitting that was Laurents’ and his mistake.)
The world is “mad,” Hapgood shouts at the end of act one. If you ask me, the mad ones are those who thought this misbegotten enterprise would work. (Perhaps Laurents had been reading too much R. D. Laing, whose bold theories of psychosis were hot in the 1960s.)
It’s the Sondheim songs that the cheering sell-out MasterVoices crowd came to hear— with the beloved Ted Sperling directing and conducting a 22-piece orchestra and large chorus. Not surprising. Since the genius lyricist-composer’s November 26, 2021 death, he’s been lionized as if no one else in the history of musicals has ever written a truly worthy tune.
Sondheim lets no one down here, although at a few script junctures he’s defeated by fitting Laurents’ book demands. The most unfortunate case is the first act closer, “Simple.” Simple it isn’t, as Hapgood—in a segment stretching to Wagner Ring-Cycle length—sets out to prove which town inhabitants are crackpots and which not.
But forget that one when Sondheim also came up with “There Won’t Be Trumpets” (dropped from the original production but since reinstated), the sexy “Come Play With Me” (with the inspired “In time, mais oui, we may” wordplay), “Anyone Can Whistle,” Hapgood’s insistent “Everybody Says Don’t,” the enthusiastically pastiche-y “I’ve Got You to Lean On,” and “With So Little to Be Sure Of.”
A few extra words on “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” which, as I count, is one of only two Sondheim love songs avoiding his abiding ambivalence theme. He can easily be forgiven for his off-rhyme of “live in” with “given” (something he may not have forgiven another lyricist), if only for the magnificent “Crazy business this, this life we live in” with the juxtaposed dramatic “this, this.”
And there’s the simplicity of the title tune. Some say this one is the closest Sondheim—who made it a strict rule to write for characters—came to an autobiographical song. He all but admitted as much when at the star-studded March 11, 1973 Shubert retrospective, the single song he performed was “Anyone Can Whistle.”
At the MasterVoices evening, Stanley sang “Anyone Can Whistle with stunning directness. It was the night’s vocal high point. The others, including Douglas Sills as Mayoress Hooper’s paramour, were mostly closely enough to the money. Whether Williams ever quite understood she was playing someone deeply corrupt remains a question mark. Fontana, always engaging, could have supplied more gravitas. Joanna Gleason was an attractive narrator, doing what she could to enliven the Laurents elements.
Perhaps the one-night venture was ultimately illuminating in offering proof that Anyone Can Whistle wasn’t an accidental flop. It also demonstrated that Sondheim’s growth as a legend was prominently on display. Isn’t that really all the grieving and celebrating Sondheimers want to know?
Anyone Can Whistle was presented for one performance on March 10, 2022, at Carnegie Hall. Information: mastervoices.org
