Anyone Can Whistle

While three or four songs short of a good score, the nurse Fay Apple’s three items – “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” “Anyone Can Whistle” and “Take One Step” – are alone worth the ticket price, and Rosalie Craig despatches them beautifully.

But even she is upstaged by a knock-out turn from Issy van Randwyck, shimmering with bitchy malice in a red gown and perfect coiffure, and articulating with the precise savagery of a square-jawed cobra, as the wicked mayoress, Cora Hooper (the Lansbury role), who hoodwinks her townsfolk in the middle of the Depression with false promises and fake miracles.

Arthur Laurents‘ libretto is a fascinating mess, a sort of botched Group Theatre job Marc Blitzstein might have had knocked into shape by John Houseman, with witty remarks and a love story; Fay is rescued, or corrupted in a different way, by David Ricardo-Pearce’s reforming Hapgood, their future delicately and lyrically poised in their “With So Little To Be Sure Of” duet.

Following the John Doyle model of singers who play instruments, the impoverished townspeople and the inmates of Dr Detmold’s “Cookie Jar” for the socially pressured are played by a versatile octet whose fine playing reinforces their rumbling hostility.

And the designs of Morgan Large (sets), Christopher Nairne (lighting) and Emily Stuart (costumes) are little short of miraculous in giving the piece an epic grandeur in a tiny space.