This delightful original musical pokes fun at gullible rubes and pompous leading citizens in a small American town. A stranger arrives, pretends to be someone he is not, disrupts everyday life, and captures the imagination of the town's sole intellectual, a repressed young woman. When she discovers that he's a fraud, both characters are changed. The score is notable for mixing musical underscoring with rhythmic dialogue, and for pastiche of Americana, with a march, a gospel chorus, and a barbershop quartet.
Does this describe the huge Broadway hit of 1957, The Music Man, book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Wilson, or is it Anyone Can Whistle, book by Arthur Laurents, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, a show that ran for just nine performances in 1964?
Although the answer is "both," Anyone Can Whistle is no rip-off of Music Man, nor a mockery of it. In his memoir Finishing the Hat, Sondheim includes Wilson in a list of lyricists whose work he appreciates, and Barbara Cook in her memoir quotes Sondheim praising The Music Man's opening number.
Besides, the same synopsis fits another show of the era, 110 in the Shade, based on a 1950s movie, The Rainmaker. For that matter, that story of the unmarried repressed woman learning to live and love from a man playing a role is also the story of Laurents's script for the film Time of the Cuckoo and the musical he made from it with Sondheim and Richard Rodgers, Do I Hear a Waltz? The very term "repressed" belongs to the zeitgeist of the 1950s and 60s, Freud lurking in the background.
Nor is Anyone Can Whistle all that "delightful." Sondheim recalls how the playwright Peter Shaffer, who happened to sit beside him on a plane soon after the show, called it brilliant and "irritating." Where Wilson poked fun, Laurents and Sondheim were out for blood, taking satirical stabs at militarism, McCarthyism, religiosity, gender stereotypes, suburban life, psychoanalysis, and, in the one joke that remains funny all these years later, Civil Rights: a black man named Martin responds to the suggestion that his "line of work" -- i.e., "going to schools, riding in buses, eating in restaurants" -- might be "getting too easy." Martin shrugs, "Not for me -- I'm Jewish!" At the end of Act One, the psychiatrist character Hapgood stands in a pinpoint of light, turns to tell the audience directly, "You are all mad!" and then lights come up to reveal the entire cast in theater seats, pointing at the audience and laughing. Sondheim writes, "There's a very thin line between smart and smart-ass, and we overstepped it," though he thinks the latter part of the show achieved "a better mix of satire and feeling" (Finishing the Hat, 125).
[Photo below: Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick in Anyone Can Whistle, 1964]
But Anyone Can Whistle does have its delights, as Sondheim finds heart in cartoonish characters. For "Nurse Fay Apple," originally played by Lee Remick, Sondheim wrote a passionate show-stopper about looking for a hero to save the community, "There Won't Be Trumpets." Because Remick stopped the show with a monologue prior to the song, it was cut, being redundant, but the revue Side by Side by Sondheim brought it new life. Sondheim wrote the song "Anyone Can Whistle" for the same character, who sings, "What's hard is simple; what's natural comes hard," and who pleads with the stranger "Hapgood" to teach her "how to let go, lower my guard, learn to be free." It's a sentiment that many of us can identify with, one that we don't hear a lot in other ballads. For Hapgood (originally played by Harry Guardino), Sondheim wrote an anthem, "Everybody Says Don't," that builds through a list of don'ts and can'ts : "don't disturb the peace … can't laugh at the king … don't believe in miracles," to a full-throated affirmation, "I believe in miracles / If you do them... I say don't! / Don't be afraid!"
Sondheim combines all of these numbers in one fierce song of disillusionment for Fay, "See What it Gets You."
Give yourself
If somebody lets you,
See what it gets you,
See what it gets you!
Give yourself and somebody lets you
Down!
The bridge encapsulates the arc of her story:
Here's how to crawl,
Now run, lady!
Here's how to walk,
Now fly!
Here's how to feel -- have fun, lady,
And a fond good-bye!
She comes to a decision:
When the hero quits,
Then you're left on your own,
And when you want things done,
You've got to do them yourself,
Alone!
The song reaches its climax: "Here I hope I come!" She launches into an upbeat reprise of "Anyone Can Whistle," made almost frantic when phrases from "Everybody Says Don't" play rapid-fire in the accompaniment. She is determined to be the hero that she was looking for in "Trumpets":
Just once, I'll do it,
Just once, before I die!
Lead me to the battle.
What does it take?
Over the top,
Joan at the stake.
Anyone can whistle -- (SHE tries to whistle, and fails.)
-- Well, no one can say
I didn't try!
A comic ballet follows, and then a heart-breaking duet for Fay and Hapgood, "With So Little to be Sure Of." Not the man he pretended to be, he's leaving town; she will remain behind, serving her patients. But they're both better for the encounter:
With so little to be sure of,
If there's anything to be --
Being sure enough of you
Made me sure enough of me.
While she thanks him for their time together, he sings a plaintive counter melody, "The more I memorize your face, the more I never want to leave."
Aside from the numbers related to Fay and Hapgood, the score is largely pastiche. Sondheim explains that he had used pastiche in earlier shows "to set time and place," but, writing for Angela Lansbury's character, Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper, he intended "to convey Cora's heartlessness through the use of a slick, jazzy showbiz style" which he used for her and her cohort, "in contrast to the personal musical language of the other characters" (116). He tells how Lansbury asked him to write a number with heart in it, and he found a way to do it, playing off of a character both venal and narcissistic:
I see flags, I hear yells,
There's a parade in town.
I see crowds, I hear yells,
There's a parade in town.
But her townspeople are cheering for Doctor Hapgood. "Any parade in town without me must be a second - class parade, so, Ha!" When the stage empties, she sings to the audience,
I'm dressed at last, at my best,
And my banners are high.
Tell me, while I was getting ready,
Did a parade go by?
Omigosh, there's a universal plea in the song for this cartoon character!
Sondheim remembers that the show's early demise didn't affect him the way he'd expected. "I was buoyed by the realization that I had loved writing it and that I was happy with the result," both "inventive" and, "above all, playful" (139). The fifteen-minute number "Simple" was Sondheim's first experiment with writing an extended piece that mixes music and rhythmic dialogue, a technique at which he has become the master.
I've enjoyed the 1995 recording before a live audience at Carnegie Hall starring Bernadette Peters, Scott Bakula, and the late Madeline Kahn; but the original cast, who recorded the score on the day after the show closed, gave it their all. Producer Goddard Lieberson took a chance recording a flop, betting that its better qualities would win it a place in music theatre history. If you're not familiar with the show, try that one out -- and see what it gets you!
[Photo: Laurents and Sondheim, at the recording of the cast album, the day after the show closed.]
PS - The guy who posts on YouTube under the title Musical Theatre Mash makes a strong case for the show's being, not "ahead of its time" as some claimed, but about seven years too late. The show's story and themes all revolve around a crowd of "non-conformists" and their challenge to the Leave It To Beaver - Father Knows Best 1950s establishment. As the Musical Theatre Mash - guy points out, that kind of non-conformism was going mainstream in 1964. "Just down the street," he says, the first version of Hair was being written. (See his incisive video here.)
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