Anyone Can Whistle

Stephen Sondheim is indisputably the pre-eminent Broadway composer/lyricist of the last half-century, and the tiny but resourceful (and shamefully not publicly funded) Bridewell Theatre at Blackfriars has become his British home.

It was here in December 1997 that the world premiere was given of Saturday Night, a show that would, 42 years earlier, have marked his Broadway composing debut but was shelved when the producer died. Now the Bridewell is landlord to London’s first full professional staging of Anyone Can Whistle, which is the other Sondheim show that got away – until now.

The show was a nine-performance Broadway flop in 1964. While many of its frequently sublime songs – including the haunting title number, the bracing wordplay of “Everybody Says Don’t”, the lilting tentativeness of “With So Little to Be Sure Of”, and the defiant “There Won’t Be Trumpets” – have lived on in countless revues and cabarets, it remains one of his most neglected shows. Even so, there have been a few attempts to put it back on the map, including concert stagings at the recent Cardiff International Festival of Musical Theatre in November, and before that in London (at the Savoy as part of the now-belated Covent Garden Festival) and New York (at Carnegie Hall in 1995) as well as a regional production at Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre in 1986.

But on the evidence presented at the Bridewell, and in spite of a revised book by the original scriptwriter (and director of the ill-fated original production) Arthur Laurents, Anyone Can Whistle‘s undoubted musical riches aren’t matched in theatrical terms. Audacious and ahead-of-its-time when it was written, tackling themes of insanity and political corruption, individuality and conformity, Sondheim has said that “in 1964, it was very daring, and the satire was very sharp and shocking.”

Nowadays, however, what starts out as intriguing – town mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper (Paula Wilcox) seeks to revitalise the local economy by inventing a fake miracle – soon becomes wearying as Nurse Fay Apple (Janie Dee) doubts its authenticity but is prepared to try anything for her patients of the lunatic asylum, the Cookie Jar. As the show questions who’s sane and who’s mad, it implicates us all – just as Sondheim would, in his 1979 masterwork Sweeney Todd, have his title character turn on the audience with his cry that everyone deserves to die.

Here, the story unravels through its complicated path, and while the songs offer some consolation, the principals of Michael Gieleta’s crowded production don’t always give them the value they’re due. Dee, at least, remains an irrepressible comic force, and Edward Baker-Duly has pecs appeal as her suitor Dr Hapgood but is otherwise unduly bland.

– Mark Shenton