Anyone Can Whistle (1964)
Book: Arthur Laurents
Quickly to:
In short: The absurdist Anyone Can Whistle was a famous flop. However, over time, Sondheim’s music and lyrics have been reappraised, and several songs from the show are now considered Broadway classics.
Anyone Can Whistle is a remarkable piece of musical theatre,
Scott miller, writer and artistic director
remarkable for its ambitions, its brazen bucking of convention, its considerable charm, its non-stop hilarity, and the fact that it was the first Sondheim show that really gave us a glimpse at the genius of his later work.
Overview Anyone Can Whistle - background and excerpts
Anyone Can Whistle is a satirical, absurdist musical with elements of farce. It stands as one of Broadway’s most famous flops. The production was plagued by various setbacks and internal conflicts. After just a week, the curtain fell on the musical following negative reviews. The cast album was recorded only afterward, and even for lead actors like Angela Lansbury, the lack of enthusiasm is audible.
Cult Status
Sixty years later, Anyone Can Whistle has achieved cult status. Several songs have become well-loved, and in 2020, a full cast album was released for the first time, following initial recordings in 1997. Anyone Can Whistle produced a number of Broadway classics, including the title song, “Everybody Says Don’t,” and “There Won’t Be Trumpets.” It is primarily Sondheim’s music and lyrics that have found new life, while the show itself remains regarded as flawed, with productions remaining rare.
Plot Summary
In an American town, Mayor Cora Hoover Hooper stages a fake miracle to attract tourists. Nurse Fay Apple, who is skeptical of the miracle, and Dr. J. Bowden Hapgood, who questions the townspeople’s mental health, team up to expose the fraud. When the tourists arrive, they get mixed up with non-conformists who have been committed to an institution known as “The Cookie Jar.”
Reception
According to Sondheim and many critics, Anyone Can Whistle , despite its brilliant moments, suffered from the visible smugness and even condescension of its young creators. A striking example is the end of the first act, where the actors reverse roles and applaud the audience. Additionally, the show addresses so many social issues in its satirical style that the audience can easily lose track. Themes include conformity, individual freedom, social control, corruption, the power of religion, and views on mental health. Such direct social critique was in itself already highly unusual for a musical.
Introducing Audiences to Sondheim
Compounding this was the unfamiliarity and unpopularity of Sondheim’s musical style. A criticism that would follow Sondheim throughout his career — much to his frustration — was that his music wasn’t “hummable,” a result of his choice to prioritize story and emotion in each piece and character. He later directly referenced this in the autobiographical song “Opening Doors” from Merrily We Roll Along . For audiences of Anyone Can Whistle , this was their first encounter with his unique musical style, apart from A Funny Thing which showcased it to a lesser extent. As this site demonstrates, appreciation for his style has since grown tremendously.
Video excerpts (in show's order)
- “Me and my town” introduces Cora Hoover Hooper in all her narcissistic and opportunistic glory.
- “There won’t be trumpets” is the song in which Nurse Fay Apple sings to her “cookies” from the Cookie Jar, as she faces arrest for refusing to identify who in the mixed crowd are cookies and who are tourists.
- After escaping, she returns in disguise as the seductive “Lady from Lourdes” and entices the young Hapgood, who has captivated the town, with “Come play wiz me”The version on the new cast album is also worth a listen, with Maria Friedman seizing every comic opportunity in the song.
- Following the revelation of Fay’s true identity, she reflects in the introspective “Anyone can whistle”.
- In “Everybody says don’t” Hapgood persuades Fay to free her cookies, and in doing so, to free herself mentally as well.
- “There’s always a woman” is the comic confrontation between Fay and the mayor, Cora Hoover Hooper, featured in both the Broadway and Dutch versions of the revue Putting it Together.
What’s hard
is simple.
What’s natural
comes hard.
Though we may not agree
today,
In time,
Mais oui,
We may.
She almost
looks human.
It must be the lighting.
With so little to be sure of in this world,
we had a moment,
a marvelous moment…
Stephen Sondheim about Anyone Can Whistle
“Anyone Can Whistle was my first commercial failure and, after reading the most dreadful notices, I expected to feel devastated. Instead, I felt only disappointment that the show would close almost immediately and therefore that more people who might enjoy it would not have the chance to see it.
I was buoyed by the realization that I had loved writing it and that I was happy with the result. Smart-ass though it may have been, Whistle was unconventional and inventive and, above all, playful.
It gave me my first chance to write extended song forms involving dialogue, as in “Simple” and allowed me to use pastiche for comment on character and style, as in Cora’s songs and “The Cookie Chase” – devices I continued to experiment with in subsequent shows.
It was a laudable attempt to present something off-center in mainstream musical theater.”
More Anyone Can Whistle: audio and video
Go to More Sondheim for our Sondheim Archives.
Anyone Can Whistle in the Netherlands
Audio and video
Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (2020): audio and photo’s.
Reviews of Anyone Can Whistle
Original production (1964)
“Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, the authors of the new musical that arrived Saturday night at the Majestic Theater, have aimed for originality, and for that one respects them. Their trouble is that they have taken an idea with possibilities and have pounded it into a pulp.
Mr. Laurents’s book lacks the fantasy that would make the idea work, and his staging has not improved matters. Mr. Sondheim has written several pleasing songs but not enough of them to give the musical wings. Not even a remarkable dancing ensemble, which executes Herbert Ross’s amusing and dazzling patterns, can right the balance of a concept weighed down by its own crudity.” – Howard Taubman, New York Times (1964)
Encores! production New York (2010)
“Forty-six years after its ignoble Broadway debut, Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle roars back into town triumphant. Triumphant with an asterisk, perhaps; this wild and crazy musical, circa 1964, retains its problems — most especially the libretto by Arthur Laurents, which figuratively and literally places the audience in the crazy house. But Sondheim’s remarkable early score is served up like a jewel on a velvet cushion, with extraordinary performances from three of Broadway’s finest current-day stars.” – Steven Suskin, Variety (2010)
First Full Recording (2020)
“Chaotic it still is. Laurents’s satirical book, though clever and novel, works too hard at too many things, aiming darts at every -ism in its path: conformism, evangelism and cronyism among them. […] But it wasn’t just the complicated book; audiences weren’t yet ready for the complications of Sondheim. Despite his score for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum — a hit that was still running after two years on Broadway — he was mostly pegged as a lyricist, and his music for Whistle did not go over well. In The Times, Howard Taubman allowed that some songs were pleasing, “but not enough of them.” Another critic called the music, inaccurately, atonal.
Despite such judgments, several songs from Whistle — including “A Parade in Town,” “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” “With So Little to Be Sure Of” and the title song — are now widely performed. Smallish revivals over the years, and a starry Encores! presentation in 2010, demonstrated that much of the show could be redeemed by its score.” – Jesse Green, New York Times (2021)
2 thoughts on “Anyone Can Whistle (1964)”