Alex Young and Danny Lane in Anyone Can Whistle
(Picture: Danny With A Camera)Has anything dated as badly as 1960s zaniness? Except perhaps that decade’s hazy romanticisation of mental illness as a countercultural force, and the belief that women need to be “awakened”. Unfortunately, the first London revival of a Stephen Sondheim musical following his death last November is this 1964 dud which conflates all three. Georgie Rankcom’s oafish production, packed with pratfalls, mugging and forced hysteria, makes the show’s relative neglect over the decades seem entirely justified.
To be fair, the problem lies less with Sondheim’s music and lyrics than with Arthur Laurents’s book, which feels like it was bashed out in desperation hours before the first night. In a nameless, bankrupt American town, corrupt mayor Cora Hoover Hooper and her cronies fake the existence of a curative miracle spring to lure tourists.
Instead it draws nurse Fay Apple and her 49 charges from the local mental hospital, known as The Cookie Jar, who mingle with and become indistinguishable from the general population. Puckish young interloper J. Bowden Hapgood further muddies the waters. Because, like, who’s really crazy, right, man?
Faye falls for Hapgood but can only set aside her sense of “control and order” (for which read that 60s male gaslighting term, “frigidity”) by posing in underwear and a pink wig as an outrageously accented Miracles Inspector from Lourdes.
Honestly, where to start with this? The endless references to “loonies” or the meaningless repetitions (“Hello! Hello! Watch cry! Reverse!”) that stud the script? The seduction scene where Faye asks Hapgood if ‘e likes ‘er leeps and ‘er - ow-you-say – ‘eeps? The mindless, blathering non-sequiturs?
Rankcom has recruited a partly gender-fluid cast to buttress the idea that this is a satire on conformity, but otherwise compounds the show’s faults. The costumes are a horrible, anachronistic pastiche of hippy garb. The cast mostly use their own accents but adopt a uniform, desperate, madcap air. There’s gratuitous audience harassment.
The show is staged traverse-style on a low catwalk between two banks of seats, and Natalie Pound’s five-strong band frequently drowns out the cast. A shame because Chrystine Symone, as Fay, has a fine voice, and Alex Young as Cora clearly has good pipes too as well as comic flair. But they are given insufficient direction, flailing for attention in a sea of crassness, along with newcomer Jordan Broatch’s willowy, simpering Hapgood.
Sondheim? Bloody hell, almost forgot about him. The score has lush moments though it often resorts to marching-band cadences, and moments of lyrical wit are balanced by dimwit rhymes (“it’s a sign/it’s divine/it’s a shrine!”). The title track, and There Won’t Be Trumpets – which was cut from the original production - have become cabaret favourites for good reason. But there are equally good reasons why this show is rarely revived. Rankcom’s production will please bereaved Sondheim completists. Anyone more discerning should give it a body-swerve.
