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The Chicago Tribune

Talkin' Broadway

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`Whistle' fails but sounds masterful
Chicago Tribune
By Michael Phillips
Tribune theater critic
August 29, 2005

There's a parade number in "Anyone Can Whistle" (1964), a sardonic echo of the parade number in "Hello, Dolly!" Beyond that the shows have nothing in common: "Hello, Dolly!" contains no songs about phony miracles or rampant hypocrisy or lyrics wedded to a story preoccupied with conformist consumerist soul-sucking societal strictures. Unless you count "Put On Your Sunday Clothes."

"Anyone Can Whistle" is the anti-"Dolly," as well as one of the most celebrated musicals in Broadway flopdom. It is unlikely ever to receive a successful fully-staged revival. Yet Stephen Sondheim's score bristles with invention, and despite librettist Arthur Laurents' addle-headed conception, the result is well worth hearing in a tiptop concert version.

Which brings us to the tiptop concert version performed over the weekend at Ravinia. This was the fifth annual Sondheim score to be showcased here, and the third featuring Audra McDonald -- performing with optimum polish and fire, as if she'd been rehearsing for months -- alongside the better-than-ever Patti LuPone, as well as the distinctively off-center Michael Cerveris. Again these three were backed by musical director and Sondheim veteran Paul Gemignani, this time leading a 22-piece orchestra.

The score contains one of Sondheim's loveliest ballads, "With So Little To Be Sure Of," sung by Nurse Fay Apple (McDonald), keeper of the "cookies" residing in a small town asylum for the "socially pressured," and her nonconformist knight in seersucker, J. Bowden Hapgood (Cerveris, wearing a ridiculous wig).

It contains "Come Play Wiz Me," an irrestistible comic number for the lovers. And the show begins -- audaciously -- with "Me and My Town," in which the town's corrupt mayor, Cora Hoover Hooper (LuPone, dressed in appalling pink and looking like her own drag queen), delivers a nightclub number in the style of Kay Thompson and les boys. For reference, check out Judy Garland's "Great Lady Has an Interview" number from the film "Ziegfeld Follies"; Thompson wrote its lyrics and helped arrange it, and the results drip with finger-snapping jive, gleefully mined by Sondheim.

At Ravinia, LuPone and Cerveris worked varying wonders with the brittle camp and idealistic hogwash, respectively. McDonald worked wonders with both the comedy and the idealism throughout, va-vooming around to beguiling effect in "Come Play Wiz Me," lending a plaintive ache to the title tune.

John Mahoney handled the narration with friendly aplomb and director Lonny Price handled the traffic efficiently.

In a pre-show talk composer/lyricist Sondheim mentioned "Bounce," seen at the Goodman Theatre in 2003. He and John Weidman may go back to an earlier version. "If we're going to fail," he said, "we're going to fail on our terms."

Time, meanwhile, has confirmed the beliefs of skeptics and fans regarding "Anyone Can Whistle." The show still doesn't work. And the score still sounds like the work of a master.

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Anyone Can Whistle
Ravinia Festival
Talking Broadway
August 29, 2005

Photo by Jim Steere : Michael Cerveris, Patti LuPone and Company

In April 1995, Anyone Can Whistle was rescued from oblivion through a high profile, one-night-only benefit concert performance at Carnegie Hall. Bernadette Peters, Scott Bakula and the late Madeleine Kahn headlined alongside narrator Angela Lansbury. Since then, it has been performed only a few times per year, mostly by schools or Sondheim-enthusiast regional companies. Considered a problematic show because of its book (by Arthur Laurents), Whistle has never received a major theatrical revival, nor was it included in the Kennedy Center’s 2002 Sondheim Celebration retrospective. The August 26-27 production this past weekend by the Ravinia Festival was the first since the Carnegie Hall event to feature a high-wattage cast. With Audra McDonald singing Fay, Michael Cerveris as Hapgood and Patti LuPone as Cora, under the musical direction of Paul Gemignani and with Sondheim himself in attendance, Whistle’s underrated score received a historic performance, ranking alongside those of the original Broadway and Carnegie Hall casts. What distinguished it from the earlier casts is that the leads of this production are all legitimately singer-actors while most of the previous leads (Harry Guardino, Lee Remick, Ms. Lansbury, Ms. Kahn and Bakula) can fairly be called singing actors. As in Ravinia’s four previous Sondheim productions, performance of the music was the first priority.

Audra McDonald, who can apparently win Tony Awards without breaking a sweat (four of them to date), delivered a performance in this show that would surely win her a nomination if she had performed it on Broadway. Her determined, principled and lonely Nurse Fay Apple delivered her big “long and loud” monologue with power and humor, following it with a hopeful “There Won’t Be Trumpets” that confirmed our expectations for a very special evening. McDonald used her comic gifts to good effect when Fay poses as a French inspector and attempts to seduce Cerveris’ character in “Come Play Wiz Me,” and shortly thereafter broke our hearts with the title song.

Cerveris, whose stature as premier Sondheim leading man was established by his Tony win for Assassins and his television performance in Passion, holds on to his crown quite easily with this performance. Refreshingly, we got to see him play a happy and well-adjusted if legally insane character this time, rather than one of the tormented souls of Assassins, Passion, and Sunday in the Park with George. Sporting a Mike Meyers look-alike wig, Cerveris goes positively goofy as Hapgood, having fun with “Simple” while delivering a relaxed but sincere rendition of “Everybody Says Don’t” - the song popularized by Barbra Streisand which along with the title number may be two of the best songs ever written for the musical theater. Cerveris found a way to make this underwritten character work. He avoided the temptation to make Hapgood a latter-day Harold Hill or any type of traditional leading man, but instead a warm and funny scamp who relishes the opportunity to make mischief for the corrupt Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper and her coterie of scoundrels. Vocally, he had a tonal color and a confident delivery that certainly surpassed the recorded performances of the vocally stressed Harry Guardino on the Original Cast Recording and the perfectly fine singing-actor performance by Bakula at Carnegie Hall.

Ms. LuPone, who surprised many with the intensity of her Fosca in Passion (which originated at Ravinia before its nationally-televised reprise at Lincoln Center), got to sing and dance the sort of loud, brassy and comic role with which we tend to associate her. “Me and My Town,” with Cora accompanied by four tuxedo-clad “boys,” was an homage to the nightclub acts of Kay Thompson, a popular nightclub singer of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s whose songs Sondheim pastiches in some of Cora’s numbers. Whistle gives her a bunch of fast and funny numbers – “The Miracle Song,” in which she sings and dances the ensemble in celebration of the her faked miracle; and “I’ve Got You to Lean On,” another nightclub style number sung with the corrupt city government officials Schub, Cooley and Magruder. LuPone belted out the brassy “A Parade in Town” – a song that is pure Sondheim in its ironic juxtaposition of Cora’s resentment at Hapgood’s usurping of her popularity with a peppy, major-key march. LuPone and McDonald slyly played up the duplicitous tendencies of female relationships with “There’s Always a Woman,” in which Cora and Fay complain and plot against each other while being all sweetness on the surface. It seems Ms. LuPone could have been even more of a clown and found greater irony in her pompous Mayoress, but vocally, she delivered the goods in a part that’s perfect for her.

Director Lonny Price packaged all this in an energetic and zany production, using a color scheme of red, white and blue (in designs by costumer Tracy Christensen, lighting by Kevin Adams and sets by James Noone) that established a visual feel akin to that of a political cartoon. An ensemble of thirty-three, all members of Ravinia’s Sandra K. Crown Program for American Musical Theater, provided rich choral work and slickly performed the ample and inventive choreography of Marla Lampert. Price had the 22-piece orchestra on stage right, leaving the remainder of the stage available for the fully staged production he delivered.

It would be hard to find many who would say that Anyone Can Whistle ever works very well dramatically, though, and for a variety of reasons this production probably won’t do much to enhance its reputation as a piece of theater. Its story – in which a corrupt local government of a bankrupt town fakes a miracle to attract tourism – is all over the board in the targets of its satire. While there’s a recently revised script (by Laurents and Michael Michetti) that was developed for a 2002 Los Angeles production that is a little tighter and clearer, the truncated concert script used here does little more than set up the songs. (The narration included in the concert version added little, in part due to the apparent lack of preparation by narrator John Mahoney. He did better on Saturday night than Friday, having had the benefit of reading the script at least once before the Saturday performance).

Some of the directorial concepts used here by Price only added to the confusion. Most problematically, he casts Cora’s cohorts Schub, Cooley and Magruder as the Marx Brothers, mimicking their voices, mannerisms and costumes. While I’m all in favor of anything that helps to immortalize the brilliant Marx Brothers, and while the idea may have helped to establish a tone of zaniness for this production, Price’s choice works against the ideas of the piece. Anyone familiar with the Marx Brothers will know that their characters were outsiders, anarchically attacking the establishment. Comptroller Schub, Treasurer Cooley and Police Chief Magruder, together with Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper are the establishment. I would guess that anyone who didn’t recognize the Marx Brothers would be a little confused. For what it’s worth, though, Jerry Galante as Cooley did a great impression of Chico. The temptation to look to films of the ‘30s and ‘40s is understandable – Anyone Can Whistle’s plot owes a great deal to films of Frank Capra in which an idealistic outsider (James Stewart or Gary Cooper) enlists the aid of a strong woman (Jean Arthur or Barbara Stanwyck) to fight the establishment – but Price put the Marx Brothers on the wrong team. It doesn’t help either that this show business reference is mixed in with unrelated references to Kay Thompson and Mike Meyers. The libretto is confused enough as it is without complicating it further.

Price’s idea to use the “red state/blue state” division of the U.S. here doesn’t entirely work, either. He initially dresses the “cookies” – patients of “Dr. Detmold’s Asylum for the Socially Pressured” - in blue and the townspeople in red. After the “cookies” escape and hide among the non-hospitalized townspeople they’re all in red, so they blend in. Hapgood, who arrives in the town and is mistakenly believed to be a new psychiatrist, divides everyone into two groups – “Group A” and “Group 1”. They begin to oppose each other, but since they remain all dressed in red the comparison to our current red and blue state rivalry is lost.

Still, one has to admire Price’s ability to make concert presentations that are so satisfying musically, but also succeed so well as theatrical pieces. We also acknowledge that the constraints of one or two-night events like these concerts don’t allow the opportunity to try out ideas in front of an audience before opening the show to the media.

Judging from comments made by Sondheim and Ravinia CEO Welz Kaufman at a public talk before the Friday night performance, it seems a safe bet that the Sondheim series, originally planned to conclude with this production, will continue for the foreseeable future. Let’s hope they do. After starting with a restaging of the LuPone/George Hearn Sweeney Todd that Kaufman produced while he was at the New York Philharmonic, Ravinia has given us an additional four original productions that have been truly remarkable. They followed Sweeney with an exceptional Night Music featuring LuPone and Hearn as well as Zoe Caldwell and Marc Kudisch, that must surely rank among the finest productions of the piece ever. The third year’s show, Passion, has had a life after Ravinia, with its PBS telecast earning acclaim and probably recognition as one of the best interpretations of the piece. Last year’s Sunday in the Park with George was an amazing demonstration of its score’s strength. This year’s production of Anyone Can Whistle was another one for the history books. It should be preserved, at least through an audio recording, so a wider audience can hear the brilliant score sung by such brilliant singers.

Anyone Can Whistle was performed at the Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, Illinois on August 26 and 27, 2005.

If you want to convince an audience that a particular musical is a whole lot better than it really is, you need do nothing more than call on Audra McDonald -- not just the most glorious singer now at work in the theater but a sensational actress, and a performer at the very peak of her astonishing powers. McDonald might not be able to solve all of the show's considerable problems, but she sure can divert attention with her blazing emotional fire, vocal beauty and total commitment.

Those who packed the Ravinia Festival's pavilion this weekend for two staged concert performances of Stephen Sondheim's "Anyone Can Whistle" -- the fifth (and perhaps not final) season of the "Sondheim 75" project -- will need no convincing about McDonald. But they might add that when you deck her out in a red, spaghetti-strap gown that hugs every curve, toss on a sleek, Josephine Baker-style wig and perch her atop a pair of stylish retro heels, you not only give her added ammunition, you make almost everyone else onstage seem like supporting characters. And the "everybody else" in this case included such formidable presences as Patti LuPone, Michael Cerveris and John Mahoney (as narrator), all of whom were superb.

Even in a prim blue-and-white uniform, McDonald, who plays the highly disciplined psychiatric nurse, Fay Apple, can (and did) stop the show, whether diving into a maniacal monologue about her own willful single-mindedness or blowing the stuffings out of Sondheim's heraldic song, "There Won't Be Trumpets," a clarion declaration for the anti-romantic dreamer. But it's in that vampy red dress, as she tried to make a connection with the brilliant but eccentric outsider, J. Bowden Hapgood (Cerveris), that McDonald sealed the deal -- first with the French-accented "Come Play Wiz Me," all playfully sexy insinuation, and then, when returned to her character's true, over-controlled self, with the musical's title song, a heartbreaking example of self-analysis.

"Anyone Can Whistle," which debuted on Broadway in 1964, was Sondheim's second major music-and-lyrics project, and the more you hear the score, the more there is to admire, especially when it is sung as superbly as it was here, and with veteran Sondheim musical director Paul Gemignani and the Ravinia Festival Orchestra in a vibrant, nuanced, passion-packed performance.

But from the start the show's problem was its book (by Arthur Laurents). A hodgepodge of sophomoric rebellion that compares and contrasts the corrupt nutcases running a small-town city hall with the patients and staff of the local mental institution, it comes to the not very earth-shattering conclusion that there is little difference between those on the outside and those on the inside of such places.

To be fair, the book has a few bursts of smart comic writing. But a narrated concert version is definitely the way to go with this show, eliminating at least some of the mind-numbing cuteness of scenes in which inmates of the Cookie Jar parade around town in the same kind of stupor as its "normal" inhabitants. Director Lonny Price -- in his fifth edition of the Ravinia Sondheim series -- quickened the pace all around, and found a way to intensify the fractured love story at the heart of the show.

James Noon's comic book-like set, in bright red and blue (as clearcut as a current U.S. electoral map), was perhaps less politically charged than the fact that this tale of city corruption arrived onstage at the very same moment that our own mayor was being visited by the Feds.

As Mayor Cora Hoover Hooper, Patti LuPone (the role originated by Angela Lansbury) was all brash and bristling infallibility in her 1950s cerise satin cocktail hour garb. Winningly jazzy (with a Latin undertow) in "Me and My Town," she lead the gospel roof-raiser "Miracle Song," and "There's a Parade in Town." And she and McDonald revealed all their claws in the competitive catfight song, "There's Always a Woman."

LuPone also had some playful byplay with her city servants, who Price neatly turned into the Marx Brothers (with particularly zesty work by Ray Wills, as a Groucho-like comptroller). As for Cerveris, who will play the demon barber Sweeney Todd on Broadway this season, he could not have been more charming. Looking startlingly different in a shaggy wig, he was a sweet, offbeat foil for McDonald's seriousness, bringing an especially lovely, childlike quality to "Everybody Says Don't."

But then there was McDonald to capture to perfection the aching sense of love and loss in "With So Little to Be Sure Of." One thing you can always be sure of is that McDonald will prevail.

'ANYONE CAN WHISTLE'

AT THE RAVINIA FESTIVAL