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IAN: Anyone Can Whistle [1]

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Date: 2023-01-22

After its ignominious debut, Anyone Can Whistle has had few full-blown revivals, although it has had a number of staged concert versions.

Anyone Can Whistle, pulled after nine Broadway performances in 1964, remains an elusive curiosity. A measure of the mess it became is that the best song, There Won’t Be Trumpets, imagining how a Messiah may arrive, was cut in New York to save time, but, after becoming a cabaret standard, restored to the score. www.theguardian.com/...

Audra McDonald played Nurse Apple in the 2005 Ravinia Festival production. Here, she speechifies, and then sings “There Won’t Be Trumpets.”

Fay Apple, a young nurse from The Cookie Jar, is deeply skeptical. The 49 patients seem far healthier and happier than the disgruntled townspeople…. Fay secretly hopes for a personal miracle, a hero who will deliver the town from the madness created by [Mayor] Cora and her venal team (“There Won’t Be Trumpets”). everythingsondheim.org/...

[6:01]

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In some ways, the show prefigures the absurdity of our time politics.

Anyone Can Whistle is an absurdist political satire set in dramatist Arthur Laurents’ imaginary town bankrupted by corrupt Mayor Cora, whose gormless entourage conjure a fake miracle of water pouring from a rock…. The plot is absurd both as a theatrical genre and pejoratively, although with some serious intent…. www.theguardian.com/...

Patti LuPone, who played Mayor Cora at Ravinia, sings the title song during lockdown. [3:03]

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The original 1964 cast starred Angela Lansbury as the mayor, and here, from the original Broadway cast recording, she sings “Me and My Town.”

Cora is the gleefully corrupt mayoress who reigns over an economically depressed small town. She’s in cahoots with the treasurer and chief of police, refers to her voters as “peasants”, and only cares about her own popularity, pleasure, and staying in power. She finds a dodgy quick fix in a pretend miracle (water pouring from a rock) that draws paying crowds. www.londontheatre.co.uk/...

[4:26]

Lansbury discusses the show [6:12]:

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Nurse Fay longs to shed her hidebound life — to whistle, in the parlance of the show. Then she meets Hapgood...

However, per the title song, Fay also longs to let go, or be able to whistle. Cue a new arrival, the nonconformist J Bowden Hapgood, who challenges everything from set gender roles to taxation and unthinking patriotism. He and Fay begin to bond, but it’s impossible to fully invest in them amidst the wacky plot developments and smug, stick it to the man point-scoring. www.londontheatre.co.uk/...

Raúl Esparza played J Bowden Hapgood in the 2010 Encores! version. And Hapgood’s signature song is a knockout: “Everybody Says Don’t” [2:41].

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Sutton Foster as Fay Apple (in disguise) and Raúl Esparza in that 2010 Encores! production, singing “Come Play Wiz Me” [3:35]:

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Patti LuPone as the mayor with Audra McDonald at the Ravinia Festival, 2005: “There’s Always A Woman” [3:17].

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So what makes Anyone Can Whistle such a flop?

Well, it’s certainly over the top. Here are some other opinions:

In Finishing the Hat, Sondheim confessed, “Arthur and I had written the piece as if we were the two smartest kids in the class (in the back row, of course), wittily making fun of the teacher as well as our fellow students, demonstrating how far ahead of the established wisdom we were.” That attitude didn’t sit well with critics or audiences. everythingsondheim.org/… *** There’s a resonant point somewhere in here about how we mistreat “others” in society, whether that’s artists who think differently or those who don’t fit our existing norms. But, ironically, the show is so strenuously unconventional that all meaning is lost. A fun attempt, but this is one for the Sondheim completists. www.londontheatre.co.uk/… *** [T]he satire on political corruption and the hypocrisy of those who exploit religion for their own prophet, I mean profit, is as subtle as spray canned graffiti. www.express.co.uk/...

Musical Theater Mash has some ideas, too [8:56]:

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You can decide for yourselves whether this cult classic is great or not, because YouTube has the Ravinia Festival version, starring Audra McDonald as Nurse Fay Apple, Patti LuPone as Mayor Cora Hoover Hooper, and Michael Cerveris as J Bowden Hapgood.

It was written in 3 Acts, but at Ravinia, Acts 2 and 3 were combined.

Act I [40:58]

Act II [1:07:22] (Warning: While the first part is a pretty good audience recording, Part II has some video problems, although the sound is decent in both.)

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Have a terrific day!

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