Donna Murphy as Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper and the Boys *
(Photo credit: Carol Rosegg)
Anyone Can Whistle, the legendary Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents failure from 1964 is back with its first midtown revival, and from the audience reaction to the David Ives adaptation, it sounds like there is a life after Broadway. Still as kooky as ever, the musical comedy in its concert staging by Casey Nicholaw proves to be great fun. This show which has been kept alive by the cult original cast album which introduced Angela Lansbury to the musical theater is the last entry of NY City Center Encores! 2009-2010 season. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the production showcases the incomparable Donna Murphy in the leading role who gets the most mileage possible out of this over-the-top mayor and villain.
Billed as the first musical in three acts (which may have been wishful thinking), Anyone Can Whistle opened during a season when such shows as Hello, Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof trumpeted traditional values as the way to go. Most likely the first Broadway musical of the theater of the absurd, the 1964 Anyone Can Whistle which advocated non-conformity following the end of the Eisenhower Era was ahead of its time. It satirized every target on the American scene and proclaimed “do your own thing.” It preceded King of Hearts (1966), HAIR (1968), All in the Family (1971), Maude (1972), and Saturday Night Live (1975), even John Dexter’s production of the Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Metropolitan Opera, all of which also tried to make the world safe for letting it all hang out and going your own way.
While the Sondheim score (both music and lyrics) is the first one in which his own unique voice is heard, the problem has always been Laurents’ original and anarchic book. It is fine to advocate anarchy as long as you present it in an organized fashion. This Anyone Can Whistle fails to do. Even in Ives’ pared down libretto the show still doesn’t make complete sense, but everyone on stage seems to be having a great time and the audience does to. The theme of this story which advocates the joys of non-conformity seems to be that the sane people are in the asylums and the crazy people are running the world. A similar point of view was much more successfully handled in Philippe de Broca’s international film hit, King of Hearts, only two years after Anyone Can Whistle was created, and has also gone on to cult status.
Ives’ skillful concert adaptation reduces the original three act structure to two. The original Laurent book uses a framework that allows him to take potshots at greed (corrupt officials), politics (backroom dealings), religion (phony miracles), psychology (fake cures), etc., by use of a narrated story of an unnamed small American town that is bankrupt. The only place in town that is doing well is Dr. Detmold’s Asylum for the Socially Pressured, nicknamed by the locals the “Cookie Jar.”
Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper (played by Murphy), the richest woman in town, runs a tight ship along with her gaggle of cronies, Comptroller Schub (Edward Hibbert), Treasurer Cooley (Jeff Blumenkrantz) and Police Chief Magruder (John Ellison Conlee), but due to the bad economic times Cora’s reputation is at a new low and she is now wildly unpopular.
Her solution is to create a miracle that will bring pilgrims and with them dollars. As the money pours in, trouble is brewing: Nurse Fay Apple (Sutton Foster) has brought all 49 Cookies from the Cookie Jar to the shrine to take the cure. However, as the miracle is a fake, it is necessary to keep the Cookies from demonstrating that it doesn’t work. When Nurse Apple is ordered to take the Cookies back to the Cookie Jar, they blend in with the pilgrims and no one can tell which is which. Nurse Fay refuses to identify them.
Just as she is to be arrested, Dr. J. Bowden Hapgood (Raśl Esparza) arrives and offers to sort out the problem. He interrogates all those on the line for the Miracle Rock and divides them into two groups, Group A and Group I. Refusing to reveal which are the Cookies and which are the Pilgrims, Hapgood finally turns to the audience and announces that “You are all mad.” And that is only Act One of the original three acts.
The score is the first one in which Sondheim began turning musical numbers into little one act plays, and has a great many unfamiliar but witty songs. Cleverly staged by director/choreographer Nicolaw, such musical numbers as “Miracle Song,” “Simple (The Investigation),” and “I’ve Got You to Lean On” are actually complete mini one-act musicals.
Backed by her own personal ever-present foursome made up of Clyde Alves, Grasan Kingsberry, Eric Sciotto, and Anthony Wayne, Murphy in her opening number “Me and My Town” proves herself the consummate musical comedy performer. She again takes the stage by force in her rendition of “A Parade in Town.”
Foster and Esparza’s “Come Play with Me,” in which Nurse Fay sneaks back into town in order to investigate the miracle disguised as Colette, the Lady from Lourdes, is very seductive. Sutton’s rendition of the title song, Hapgood’s impassioned “Everybody Says Don’t,” and their final duet, “With So Little to Be Sure Of” are equally haunting. Nicholaw’s “Cookie Chase” ballet at the musical climax is more conventional than the material warrants but is entertaining nevertheless.
Murphy’s performance as Cora Hoover Hooper is one for the books. She sparkles, she prances, she glides, she twinkles, she flirts, she skips, she effervesces, in a word, she dazzles. In a role that is both the story’s villain and the show’s protagonist, she doesn’t let a moment’s opportunity pass. Foster’s Nurse Fay is stiff and unyielding in a rather boring manner but her transformation into Colette, the Lady from Lourdes, with a flaming red wig and an equally phony French accent is a hoot. Playing a 1964 psychiatrist, Esparza is stalwart and efficient but cuts loose with his musical numbers. Of the supporting cast, Hibbert with his precise English manner as the cunning and conniving government official is most memorable.
Visually the show designed by John Lee Beatty (scenic consultant), Gregg Barnes (costumes) and Ken Billington (lighting) is bright and colorful, which is just what this dark material needs. Murphy is dressed in pink, Sutton’s Nurse Fay in white, while the Cookies are costumed in solid color outfits of green, yellow, blue, lavender or purple. When Nurse Fay makes her transformation into the Lady from Lourdes, she appears entirely decked out in flaming red. The lighting is equally colorful with the rear scrim turning orange, blue, pink, etc., almost as a color organ in sync with the changing moods of the musical numbers. The use of chairs rearranged in various patterns as the only scenery is reminiscent of those experimental Off Broadway shows that have used similar techniques.
The NY City Center Encores! revival of Anyone Can Whistle is a pure delight. Like a particularly ambitious episode of Saturday Night Live, the Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical probably takes on too many targets to ever be totally successful. However, its anarchic structure and equally chaotic plot no longer seem to give contemporary audiences a problem. With the accomplished Rob Berman conducting the delicious Sondheim score of rarely heard songs, and the luscious Donna Murphy cavorting on stage how can this not be a fun evening in the theater.
Anyone Can Whistle (through April 11)
NY City Center, West 55th Street bet. 6th and 7th Ave., in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-581-1212 or http://www.NYCityCenter.org