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.
