Theatre review: Anyone Can Whistle

Following Stephen Sondheim's recent death, I'm sure we're going to be getting a whole slew of new revivals commemorating a legendary songwriter whose work is rarely off the stage at the best of times. If they haven't materialised yet it's probably because high-profile producers are fighting over the rights to his most beloved works, so I guess in that context it makes sense that the first new production in London since his death is a fringe take on a show most famous because, even in the 1960s, critics and audiences weren't stoned enough to think it was any good: I imagine that at any given time the rights to Anyone Can Whistle are very much available. In a former industrial town whose only remaining business seems to be a psychiatric clinic known as The Cookie Jar, the nonspecifically corrupt mayor Cora Hoover Hooper (Alex Young) orders her lackeys to revive the town's fortunes by any means necessary.

This turns out to be by faking a miracle, by making water come out of a rock and claiming it has healing properties. But there's immediately a snag, as Cora's nemesis Nurse Apple (Chrystine Symone) brings all her "cookies" from the asylum to take the waters. When they all fail to get better, it will immediately prove the miracle a dud and send away the new pilgrims.

Which makes it sound like Anything Can Whistle has far more of a coherent plot than Sondheim (music and lyrics) and Arthur Laurents (book) have actually assembled here. In reality this is all an excuse to have the inmates muddled up with the pilgrims, and for the rest of the show to be a confused and repetitive fable about who decides who's sane or isn't, and how it can be impossible to tell who is who. Characters appear and disappear largely at random, stuff happens that the story may or may not remember five minutes down the line, Nurse Apple is intermittently French, and the attempts at wit generally land on twee.

And on paper, Georgie Rankcom's production has an approach that deals with a lot of these problems head-on, namely by embracing the madness: The original small-town Americana is gone (including the accents, with everyone using their own instead,) replaced by a Technicolour, quasi-hippy look that, even though the characters are kept to their original genders and sexualities, give a strong queer aesthetic to the show, suggesting that gender diversity in particular (cast and crew both feature a lot of people with non-binary pronouns) is the modern-day parallel the story can be a fable for. Essentially it embraces the fact that the musical is a precursor to more successful trippy musicals like Hair and Pippin, and treats them as such both in look and performance style (Cory Shipp's set and costume designs are the bastard lovechild of Pippin and Scooby Doo.)

But there's a reason those later musicals were more successful, beyond the fact that audiences might not have been quite ready when Anyone Can Whistle came along, and that's that they might be messy, but they're not this messy. When eccentric new psychiatrist, and love interest for Nurse Apple, J. Bowden Hapgood turns up, he splits the crowd up into "Group 1" and "Group A," with no apparent logic to the groupings. Jordan Broatch is an instantly likeable and charming performer, but they can't change the fact that "Simple" is interminable: Nations rise and fall, stars are born and collapse into themselves to become black holes, and at the end Hapgood is still singing about how the groups are as arbitrary as the lines between sanity and insanity and yes, I think the audience have got the point by now.

Of course this is also a musical and a Sondheim one at that, and there's definitely some enjoyable musical moments, and glimpses of the style and motifs the composer would develop and perfect over the years. And though the largely young cast aren't all entirely polished performers there's some standouts - Symone's singing voice sounds great, and was powerful enough to occasionally wake me up. But while I can see why Rankcom would try to tackle the show's messiness by leaning into it, it may have backfired as it tends to just highlight the naffness of the jokes. And when the writers have so little handle on the story it doesn't take long to stop caring, and that's where no amount of colour and action can stop proceedings from getting very dull indeed.

Anyone Can Whistle by Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents is booking until the 7th of May at Southwark Playhouse's Large Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Danny Kaan.