The Trouble with Hapgood

Anyone Can Whistle is really two musicals, two very different, not entirely compatible musicals. It's part absurdist social satire, breaking the fourth wall, acknowledging itself as theatre, rejecting naturalism and sometimes even logic; and part romantic musical comedy, complete with love songs and a happily ever after for the hero and heroine (and even the villains). So many people have tried to stage the show but have crashed and burned because they couldn't reconcile the two distinct styles. The show's primary problem is beautifully illustrated by its title. Originally it was to be called The Natives Are Restless, then changed to Side Show (and promotional materials still exist with that title), and we can guess that it was more absurdist at that point. When the title was changed to Anyone Can Whistle, after the song title, this represented a shift in the show's focus, away from wacky anarchy more toward romantic love story. Yet with so much satirical material left in the show, that change in focus only left audiences confused.

Unless a director can bring the show's two "personalities" together into a unified whole, the show can't work. Since the biting absurdism can't become a romantic comedy, the only solution seems to be to treat the love story as absurdist. Arthur Laurents has said that the show should've ended without the romantic love duet "With So Little to Be Sure Of." But losing Fay and Hapgood's resolution would cause lots of problems as well. Like Cabaret, it's almost as if the show's creators wanted to be daring, but were afraid of being too daring, so they stuck some traditional musical comedy moments in the show to mollify the audience. It didn't work, commercially or artistically -- which is not to say the show isn't good, but it is problematic.

Even the basic structure of the show is strange. First, it's in three acts, which is very rare for musicals. Second, the central conflict established in the first scene -- the town is starving -- is resolved in the second song with the fake miracle. Then we get what is really the central conflict of the show: the hospital patients (the "Cookies") mix in with the tourists and the town council needs to separate them because if the Cookies drink the water from the fake miracle and don't get healed, then everyone will know it's a hoax. In a way, this becomes a metaphor for the biggest problem with the show, that the absurdist satire (personified by the Cookies) is hopelessly mixed up with the traditional Broadway musical (in the persons of the "normal" people). Then again, there's another central conflict, which is Fay's inability to express her feelings to Hapgood. The show can't even figure out which is the central conflict, who is the protagonist, and what needs resolving.

There's No Tune Like a Show Tune

The score also has a split personality, though with better reason. Sondheim uses traditional show tune styles for the insincere characters. Cora and her town council always sing old-fashioned show tunes, all with a wicked Sondheimian twist of course, which connote shallowness, insincerity, artificiality, and deceit (what does this say about Sondheim's feelings toward old-fashioned show tunes?). Sondheim has used this kind of pastiche (the use of older traditional song forms as commentary, without parodying them) in many of his shows. It distances us from what's happening, as we become more aware of the music as music instead of as accompaniment to a character's thoughts and words. He has used pastiche in "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" and "What Would We Do Without You" in Company, in half the score of Follies, and elsewhere. In every case, it removes the song from the strange reality of musical comedy in which people break out into song and no one notices, and turns the song into a commentary. He also uses pastiche for diegetic songs, as with "Bobby and Jackie and Jack" in Merrily We Roll Along or "Unworthy of Your Love" in Assassins, songs that the characters are aware of as songs.

In contrast, songs about genuine emotion in Anyone Can Whistle are set to the more romantic, complex, rich music we've come to know as distinctly Sondheim. The music for Fay and Hapgood's songs sounds a lot like the ballads in Company and Into the Woods. It's an interesting way to separate the characters into two camps (good guys and bad guys), but it emphasizes the show's biggest flaw and we have to ask if Sondheim intentions are really ever communicated to audiences. Perhaps this conceit works better today than it did in 1964, with more sophisticated theatre-goers who are more attuned to the subtlety and complexity of Sondheim's music.

Old-Fashioned Show Tunes

The first time we hear singing in the show is "I'm Like the Bluebird," sung by the Cookies, in the style of a children's song. It's only a fragment, but we'll hear it again. The first full song in the show is Cora's "Me and My Town," a brassy, bluesy, old-fashioned show tune full of Gershwin-esque harmonies and intricate, clever rhymes. To emphasize Cora's duplicity, the song keeps switching back and forth between traditional show tune and a fiery Latin beat in the middle mambo section. The central joke of the song is a lyric full of tragic, depressing news about the town and its people, set to a jazzy, upbeat, Broadway torch song that asks for pity for the rich and powerful Cora. The funniest and most startling aspect of the song is the fact that back-up singers appear for no dramatic reason whatsoever to sing the song with Cora. Not only is Sondheim reminding us how artificial Cora is, but also how artificial Anyone Can Whistle, and musical theatre, are. At the end of the song, Sondheim returns to Cora's bluesy show tune melody, this time combined with the mambo beat underneath. It's a great splashy opening number that manages to be somewhat disconcerting as well.

The next song is another pastiche, "Miracle Song," this time in the style of revival meeting gospel number. It starts like a hymn in both its tempo and its hymn-like modal harmonies, then moves into an upbeat, full throttle gospel choral number, complete with a lead singer and responses from the "congregation." The lyrics are hilarious, demonstrating that Cora and her town council are far more excited by the miracle's inevitable financial rewards than by the miracle itself. Treasurer Cooley welcomes the "pilgrims" to the miracle, tellingly rhyming "Hear ye the joyful bells!" with "Fill ye the new motels." Meanwhile, Cora's contempt for the townspeople is reinforced with her lyric:

Come and take the waters And with luck you'll be Anything whatever, except you.

The use of pastiche in the music comments on the characters who are singing. Even the townspeople are painted as insincere, implying that though "water that you part" and "water that you walk on" aren't real miracles, but this water from a rock is. The song's lyric is filled with the phrase "The Lord said..." making it sound even more like a legitimate religious song, and thereby commenting on the mindlessness of the religious beliefs of the masses. Again, it's easy to see why audiences were put off by the show. It ridicules deeply and widely held convictions and institutions that are the very bedrock of our society. That the satire is often on the mark just makes it worse.

Strike Up the Band

The song "There Won't Be Trumpets" was cut in the original production because it came after a long, comically brilliant speech by Fay. The song is good, and it's Fay's only song in Act I, but it's an anti-climax coming after that speech. It provides some set-up for Hapgood's subsequent entrance, but the scene works just as well without it. In the rental materials for the show, the song is not listed in the musical numbers at the front of the script, but it has been reinstated in the text of the script. Whether or not it belongs there is open for debate. This is the first song in the show (if it's used) that is not pastiche. It begins with a furious, dissonant, angry introductory verse, somewhat reminiscent of music from West Side Story, then segues into the rich romantic music Sondheim writes so well. The lyric contains very little rhyme. Sondheim has said that in his work rhyme connotes intelligence and mental agility; the lack of rhyme indicates more emotional, less intellectual content. This is a song about Fay's deepest emotional hopes and beliefs and therefore the lyric is simple and straightforward, without Sondheim's usual verbal gymnastics.

It's interesting that in the second verse of the song, Sondheim adds a strong march feel to the accompaniment, even though the lyric is saying there won't be trumpets (or drums). The point is that when he comes she won't need trumpets to generate excitement; his presence will be enough. True to his lyric, the orchestration for this song is conspicuously lacking trumpets. So as she talks about his arrival, about what he'll be like, the music builds in intensity and excitement without resorting to the use of trumpets. The fanfares in the orchestration, usually reserved for trumpets, are played here by woodwinds and the xylophone (which sounds somewhat like a glockenspiel, a staple of marching bands). Orchestrator Don Walker does use brass in the song but only the low brass, mainly horns and trombones. The 4/4 march later transforms further by adding triplets to give the song the feel of a 6/8 march (like "Seventy Six Trombones").

Not Simple

"Simple," the thirteen minute climax of Act I, is anything but. In this musical sequence, the town council demands that Hapgood figure our who in the crowd are Cookies and who are tourists or townspeople. Hapgood breaks everyone up into two groups, Group A and Group One, but he refuses to say which group is sane and which is insane. The basic frame of this song is classic, dissonant Sondheim music, but the various sections frequently use both pastiche and parody of other musical styles to satirize and blow holes in a myriad of social institutions. As Sondheim has done with dozens of songs in several of his shows, including "Me and My Town," he uses Latin rhythms again in "Simple."

The sequence starts with the "Simple" theme, going from a basic 2/2 beat (almost a march but not quite) into a 3/4 waltz, back to 2/2, back to 3/4, then finally returning to 2/2. The switches in meter don't come at the end of phrases as the singer and listener would expect; they happen right in the middle of musical phrases, throwing off the downbeat and completely disorienting the listener. After two verses of the "Simple" theme sung by Hapgood, more instrumental verses follows under dialogue as Hapgood interrogates the first bystander. The bystander, George, sings the first of many watchcries (the mottos people live by). This short musical phrase is usual enough, but when it ends, the interrogation continues as the music jumps meter from 8/4 to 5/4 to 3/2, to 2/2 to 6/4, etc. Hapgood assigns George to a group and finishes the first part.

Part Two of "Simple" returns to the main "Simple" theme. This time, Hapgood confuses Cora and her council with homonyms ("A is one group, ONE is too."). They each join the theme, trying to sort out Hapgood's craziness, and the four of them end up in a quartet of meaningless statements. Part Three introduces June and John, a couple who mix pronouns and gender roles. Their watchcry ("A woman's place is in the home") begins this part, to a new Latin beat. This new music is repeated instrumentally over dialogue as Hapgood interrogates June and John. Hapgood assigns them to their groups (though they're interrogated together, they're assigned to different groups), and then all the bystanders begin singing their watchcries in no particular order, creating musical chaos until Comptroller Schub screams "Stop the music!" thereby acknowledging that they were singing, which characters in musicals aren't supposed to acknowledge -- another absurdist break with musical comedy conventions.

Another bystander steps forward, Martin, as Part Four begins. Martin is a black man and so his watchcry ("You can't judge a book by its cover") is set to American blues music over a stride piano bass line like Fats Waller made famous. After one instrumental repetition, Hapgood and Martin sing a duet ("The opposite of dark is bright") over an old-fashioned Broadway shuffle accompaniment. This segues into the "Simple" theme, which the chorus now takes up along with Hapgood and Martin. The "Simple" theme continues over dialogue as Schub demands that Hapgood make some sense out of all of this. Cora, who's been flirting with Hapgood since he arrived, steps forward to reason with him. She sings the "Simple" theme to a waltz tempo, which the chorus then joins in, and everyone ends up waltzing around the stage, Cora included.

Part Five beings with triple-time music under dialogue between Schub and Hapgood. In response to Schub's demand, Hapgood merely turns to the chorus and asks for their watchcries, which explode in more musical chaos. Hapgood creates even more confusion as the music alternates between the Latin beat from June and John's verse and the waltz tempo Cora has established. When Schub has been dispatched, the music turns to a brisk march as Sergeant MacGruder steps forward to take charge. Hapgood demands his watchcry and the good sergeant ends up babbling like the others.

Part Six offers just a short bit of the "Simple" theme, then an interrogation of Treasurer Cooley. Because Cooley was once a preacher, we hear the kind of hymn-like modal harmonies we heard in "Miracle Song," but this time with the "Simple" melody over the chords in another key, creating serious dissonance. As Cooley falls apart, Hapgood asks the crowds for their watchcries and all hell breaks loose again. Finally Schub is interrogated over underscoring with long held dissonant chords over an ominous striking bass line. When Schub has been sufficiently confused, the chorus comes in with the "Simple" theme, now in counter-point to some of the watchcries. The musical and verbal chaos builds until Hapgood looks out at the audience and declares, "You are all mad!" The circus-like music from the overture (which probably made more sense when the show was called Side Show) is heard once again, built on the "Simple" theme. Lights come up pointing into the audience's eyes, blinding them as the stage lights go own. When the stage lights come up again, the cast is seated in theatre seats onstage, laughing, applauding, and pointing at the audience is amusement. There is a blackout and the first act is over.

Who is being watched and who is doing the watching? Who is sane and who is insane? Who are the real fools? As interesting as this bizarre finale is, will an audience understand Sondheim and Laurents' point? Were audiences for the original production hostile because they didn't get it or because they did?

This sequence is remarkable for a number of reasons. It's interesting that with this piece Sondheim was following the patch of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein. Hammerstein had worked with extended musical scenes, most notably in Carousel, which included the twelve-minute all-music "If I Loved You" scene and the seven-and-a-half-minute "Soliloquy." Hammerstein continued his work with this idea but never surpassed the artistry of Carousel. Sondheim carried on this work with the balcony scene in West Side Story, the funeral sequence in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, "Someone in a Tree" in Pacific Overtures, "God That's Good" in Sweeney Todd, and the opening of Into the Woods. It's interesting to see "Simple" in the context of what came before and after it.

"Simple" is a musical scene that moves the plot forward, accomplishes a great deal of character development, and also sets up important themes and foreshadowing which will pay off later in the show. The structure of the piece demonstrates lessons learned from Hammerstein. The entire sequence is built on the main "Simple" theme, which returns periodically throughout the sequence, always recognizable yet developed with each repetition, sometimes vocal, sometimes instrumental, at first sung only by Hapgood, then progressively with more and more other characters, until at last the full company sings it. Despite a number of different, basically unrelated musical motifs, this foundation of the "Simple" theme gives the piece unity and coherent structure. One of the problems with many of the new through-sung pop operas coming to the musical stage is they contain long musical sequences that have no strong underlying structure and no musical development. Audiences find it hard to stay with the scene because they get lost in the music; there are no signposts, no help in following the path from point A to point B.

Act II

Act II begins with the "A-1 March," a comic march in which both Group A and Group one hail Hapgood as the town's hero, all the while throwing in some satiric barbs at two-party politics. It's a 6/8 march, which had been hinted at in "There Won't Be Trumpets" and which will be further developed in "There's a Parade in Town."

The Lady from Lourdes enters (actually Fay in disguise) and is soon flirting with Hapgood. Before we know it, the two of them are singing the show's first love song, "Come Play Wiz Me." This song is a foxtrot, a style that Sondheim loves and used in "Impossible" from Forum; "Side by Side by Side" from Company; several songs from Follies, including "Waiting for the Girls Upstairs," "The Road You Didn't Take," "Who's That Woman," the London revival's "Make the Most of Your Music" and the discarded "Can That Boy Foxtrot;" and also "Now You Know" from Merrily We Roll Along. Even when he was writing only lyrics, he used the foxtrot, as in both "Some People" and "You'll Never Get Away from Me" in Gypsy. "Come Play Wiz Me" is a sophisticated, sexy song, full of witty lyrics, puns, and even a couple instances of playing the French lyrics against the English ("In time, mais oui, we may."). Sondheim's affection for blues notes is evident here, with the repeated use of the raised fourth (F-sharp) and bluesy lowered seventh (B-flat). It's significant that when Fay sings the title phrase, the note on "me" is a blues note, and it's a also a "false relation" (a B-flat in the voice against a B-natural in the accompaniment). Perhaps setting "me" on a false relation is some kind of comment on the disguised Fay's "false relation" with Hapgood at that moment. The song is also literally teeming with syncopation, delayed downbeats, and blues harmonies, a kind of risque, urbane song we might have otherwise expected to be Cole Porter's (especially since Porter loved incorporating French phrases into his lyrics). Again, because the characters are playing around here and are not expressing genuine emotion, the music is pastiche and not the kind of full romantic music Sondheim will save for later.

The title song, "Anyone Can Whistle," is another song of genuine emotion, no artifice, no cleverness, and so it's pure romantic Sondheim. There's no pastiche, no commentary. This song has the simplest accompaniment in the score, an illustration of the kind of easy things that Fay longs to be able to master. As with the other emotional songs in the score, there is only minimal rhyme and none of the witty puns and internal rhymes the other songs have. For those who have criticized Sondheim and his work for being too cold, too bereft of real emotion, this song stands as proof they're wrong. Fay is a character whose feelings are so deep, so profound that she is terrified of them, paralyzed by them. Instead of yet another trivial, cliche-ridden love song about moons and stars (yes, West Side Story 's "Tonight" is such a song, but in that case the writers intended for these love-struck children to be capable of only cliches), Sondheim has written a gut-wrenching song of real emotional muscle, a song about personal complexity, about how real people feel in the real world. Like Bobby in Company and George in Sunday in the Park with George, the depth of Fay's own emotions is the most terrifying thing of all. All three of these Sondheim characters find it safer and easier to choose to subvert and submerge their feelings. It's been said that nothing is sadder than seeing someone else trying to hold their sadness inside, and that's ultimately what makes Bobby, George, and Fay so much more moving than tragic characters in other musicals. Yet we return to the same question: does this belong in an absurdist social satire?

The next song begins with a short reprise of the "A-1 March." But Cora enters, interrupting the fun and the marchers leave. Cora is left alone on stage and she sings "There's a Parade in Town," using the same 6/8 march tempo established by the "A-1 March." When Fay sang "There Won't Be Trumpets," she explained that she could have excitement, that she could have a parade without trumpets, without the usual trappings. But here the parade has left altogether and Cora is left without parade or excitement. She tells us that she knows there was a parade here before she arrived and if it happened without her, it mustn't have been much of a parade. Of course she knows that's not true. Midway through her song, the real parade returns to prove her wrong, and the "A-1 March" returns, this time in counterpoint to Cora's objections.

The show returns again to the love story as Fay and Hapgood decide what to do about the Cookies' predicament -- a plot element which has been mostly ignored since Act I. Again, the next song, "Everybody Says Don't," is a non-pastiche number. Aside from Fay and Hapgood's first song in which they flirt playfully (Hapgood not yet knowing who Fay really is), none of their music together is pastiche. This is an indication to us that their relationship is something to be taken seriously, but that also makes it even harder to fit them into the larger context of the show. "Everybody Says Don't" sits on a driving accompaniment rhythm which is close to the foxtrot tempo we heard earlier, and the vocal line is almost a patter song. Because this is more a song of philosophy than of deep emotion, the lyric is clever and full of rhyme. "Anyone Can Whistle" was a song about Fay's fears; this is Hapgood's song about conquering those fears. It follows dramatically, and this song seems to fit the style and plot of Act I better than the rest of Act II does.

Everybody Should Have Said Don't

At the end of the act, Fay destroys the Cookies' records one by one, "freeing" them by erasing their identities as mental patients. The "Don't Ballet" is a musical and choreographic dramatization of this concept, as we see each Cookie break free and dance around the stage when his record is destroyed. The "Don't Ballet" (written by dance arranger Betty Walberg, not by Sondheim) is an extremely long, very strange piece. It starts with a parody of Gershwin's American in Paris played by a muted trumpet, then moves into the accompaniment vamp from "Everybody Says Don't." By measure 14, it's imitating the West Side Story prologue musically and percussively, and it's unclear whether this is an intentional imitation, as some kind of commentary on theatre dance music at the time (this was seven years after West Side Story opened), or if Walberg did this unconsciously. There are lengthy stretches of percussion over a long held note which moves slowly up by strange dissonant intervals. Over the course of the ballet, the music moves through sections of 7/4, 6/4, 12/8, 9/8, and other unusual meters. Walberg uses lots of heavy jazz chords which again sound more like Bernstein's West Side Story music than like Sondheim's music for Anyone Can Whistle. It all ends with another quotation of the American in Paris imitation, first by the trumpets then the piccolo. It even ends with big, full orchestral Gershwin chords.

Because the show is such a gleefully nasty satire most of the time, it's tempting to think this is a clever parody of An American in Paris and West Side Story. But what is it making fun of? The music of Bernstein and Gershwin? Or is it poking fun at Jerome Robbins ground-breaking choreography for West Side Story? Neither seems appropriate here since all the other targets in the show are institutions which deserve the satiric spears. And though Sondheim uses other musical theatre forms in his songs, he never parodies them; he always treats them with respect, developing them, using them to comment, not commenting on the song forms themselves. Yet how would parodies of Bernstein and Gershwin comment on the characters or institutions in Anyone Can Whistle?

Act III

Act III returns us to the antagonists of the Act I plot -- who got almost no time in Act II -- Cora, Schub, Cooley, and MacGruder. They need to destroy the miracle and blame it on Hapgood. This will cause the town to turn against Hapgood and keep the Cookies from ruining their fake miracle and exposing Cora and the council as crooks and fakes. "I've Got You to Lean On" starts out as musical dialogue, similar in style to sections of "Simple," which certainly makes dramatic sense. Then the main body of the song moves into a perky foxtrot rhythm, matched with funny, biting lyrics and plenty of internal rhyme. The third section returns to the kind of musical dialogue that opened the song, this time accompanied by the kind of modal harmonies that were used (though more slowly) in the "Miracle Song," as the conspirators decide to publicly denounce Hapgood as an enemy of God and the Church. The subtext of the lyric is hilarious. The men show their political cowardice, and their willingness to let Cora take the heat if the plan fails, when they sing, "When everything's hollow and black, you'll always have us at your back." In response, Cora lets them know she won't be indicted without naming names. She sings, "What comfort it is to have always known that if they should catch me, I won't go alone." The song ends with a old-fashioned soft shoe dance break.

When the council turns off the miracle and declares it Hapgood's fault, the crowd turns on him, while a variation on the "Simple" accompaniment plays as underscoring. Hapgood and Fay discover Cora and Schub's deceit, and Cora orders them both out of town, to underscoring reminiscent of the "Miracle Song." Cora is back in control. Fay wants to expose Cora to the town but Hapgood won't help her. He thinks that'll only cause more trouble for Fay and him and won't accomplish anything. Feeling betrayed, Fay erupts into the angry "See What It Gets You," a song combining the pseudo-foxtrot rhythm of "Everybody Says Don't" with a driving, erratic bass line. Hapgood has convinced Fay to risk her quiet life, her security, but once she's done it, he's not there to back her up. Fay even quotes -- sarcastically -- "Anyone Can Whistle" to finish this song, but this time it's in a fast, agitated, unnatural tempo, with the woodwinds quoting "Everybody Says Don't" in between vocal lines. Sondheim has brought together Fay and Hapgood's relationship musically -- the foxtrot accompaniment of "Come Play Wiz Me," Fay's first emotional song "Anyone Can Whistle," Hapgood's response, "Everybody Says Don't," and finally Fay's counter-response, "See What It Gets You." Though the Fay and Hapgood subplot may not sit too comfortably on the rest of the plot, it certainly makes a complete musical story in and of itself.

The act continues with "Cora's Chase," a lengthy musical sequence consisting of a gleefully nasty waltz sung primarily by Cora ("Lock 'em up, put 'em away...") as suspected Cookies are rounded up and arrested; alternating with extended instrumental dance breaks. In the midst of it all is a comic a cappella quartet version of Cora's main melody, treated with solemn religious reverence; then it speeds up and gets an accompaniment as it returns to the manic pitch of the rest of the piece. Toward the end, the chorus appears singing frantically "Run for your lives, run for your lives," a kind of precursor to Sweeney Todd's "City on Fire" (the lyric even mentions fire). Cora and Schub tell Fay that they'll lock up whatever forty-nine people they want, innocent or not, sane or insane, unless Fay reveals the names of the real Cookies. She has no choice and she does. As the Cookies are assembled, the reprise their theme song, "I'm Like the Bluebird."

The last song in the show, "With So Little To Be Sure Of" returns to Fay and Hapgood's romantic subplot and the romantic Sondheim style of music that has accompanied it. The song starts with a quick quote of "Come Play Wiz Me," a reminder of how all this started (in case you'd forgotten), and then the main body of the song is one of Sondheim's most lush, beautiful melodies. But again, we have to ask if it belongs in this show. After a few more pieces of incidental music (while the plot ties up loose ends) and one more rendition of "I'm Like the Bluebird" from the Cookies, the show is over and Hapgood and Fay walk off into the sunset together to an instrumental quote of "With So Little To Be Sure Of."

Too Many Targets

One of the two fatal flaws of Anyone Can Whistle is that it takes aim at too many targets. It satirizes religion, politics and government, psychiatry (and doctors in general), tourism, marriage, gender roles, racism, and other things. The satire is generally very funny, very wicked, and frequently on target; but the audience gets lost trying to register all the satire while it's keeping track of who's the hero and who's the villain(s), keeping up with the French dialogue, various disguises and alter-egos, and trying to figure out whether the show is absurdist social satire or romantic comedy.

Mad as Hell

The old cliche that only the insane can see most clearly is embodied by Hapgood. He is our hero, the only one who can cut through all the crap, who can see how absurd it all is. And late in the show, we find out he's a patient in the Cookie Jar and not really a doctor (because of course all doctors are fools). In the opening scene, the townspeople are described in the stage directions as wearing stylized rags and clown wigs, yet when the Cookies, the insane, enter they are described as pleasantly dressed and smiling. Even the official name of the Cookie Jar -- Dr. Detmold's Asylum for the Socially Pressured -- shows the author's bias against the socially conventional view of sanity and insanity. In the interrogation, Cora thinks George is crazy because he doesn't have headaches and backaches (like "normal" people do, we presume). The show goes to great lengths to condemn conformity and makes the questionable and somewhat simplistic assumption that anyone in an asylum is really just a non-conformist or free thinker. Fay describes the Cookies as the people "who made other people nervous by leading individual lives." Schub says that safe (i.e., conformity) is sane, and Hapgood replies "Not always." Hapgood tells us at the end of the first act that we are all mad. He tells Fay that the world made the Cookies crazy. He says, "I was probably the craziest man in the world. Because I was not only an idealist, I was a practicing idealist!" Being crazy is portrayed as somehow braver, more noble, and infinitely preferable to being sane.

At the same time, psychiatry is immediately suspect, since its purpose is to cure insanity and being crazy is a good thing. In a big slam against the methods of psychiatrists, Dr. Detmold (the symbol of conventional psychiatry) says, "Psychiatrists do not fraternize with patients..." Hapgood lampoons these methods and doublespeak when he rationalizes calling the George "Hapgood"

"Calling the patient by my name, he identifies with me immediately, we have an instant transference and thereby save 5 years of psychoanalysis." Of course, the mere fact that Hapgood, a patient himself, can pass so easily for a doctor, suggests that psychiatrists know nothing anyway. The Cookies love him because "Hapgood has no answers or suggestions, only a lot of questions." The harshest condemnation of doctors is their comparison to the 1950s greatest evil, Communists, when Hapgood says, "I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the medical profession," echoing the watchcry of Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.

Sondheim even takes direct aim at McCarthy and his anti-communist witch hunts. In the Interrogation, Schub declares that Hapgood is "boring form within," the common accusation of communists, and then Schub actually calls Hapgood a communist, which Hapgood ridicules. MacGruder says his occupation is fighting the enemy. Hapgood asks "What enemy?" and MacGruder replies, "What year?" Unfortunately, McCarthy had been toppled ten years before Anyone Can Whistle opened, so the satire was a bit dated.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

The show's creators apparently think as little of politicians as they do of doctors. Every politician portrayed is corrupt, greedy, and generally amoral. Of course they're also ultimately incompetent. The politicians all have money, especially Cora, while the townspeople starve to death. Schub's proof that his plan will work is that its unethical. Yet we the people are indicted for putting these people in office. Cooley reminisces about the good old days, when the populace was "normal and frightened." In the interrogation, George says he votes, but "only for the man who wins," a shot at modern political polls and ignorant voters. The "A-1 March" is a parody of the lack of substance in two-party politics. The greatest indictment of politics is that Hapgood, a mental patient, was once an advisor to the President. The plot development where the town council set up Hapgood as the reason the miracle water stops is an illustration of how badly the public needs a scapegoat when things aren't going well.

For God's Sake

Anyone Can Whistle's other great target is religion -- not God, just religion. "The Miracle Song" is the centerpiece of this attack. The satire begins with the crass materialistic manufacture of a "miracle" to attract "pilgrims." Cora and her council and their commercialization of religion are the fictional counterparts of the bevy of televangelists on TV today, some of whom even own their own cable networks. They make millions -- some billions -- by literally "selling" religion and religious merchandise. In Anyone Can Whistle, they're selling the privilege to partake of the miracle water and be cured. They tell the pilgrims they can partake of the miracle for a modest fee. When business booms, Cora decides they're so prosperous they could issue stock. We laugh at this line, but how different is it from Pat Robertson's multi-billion dollar Christian Broadcast Network? As with most religious peddlers, this crew contends that their miracle is the greatest of them all:

There's water that you part, Water that you walk on, Water that you turn to wine! But water from a rock -- Lord! What a miracle! This is miracle that's divine, Truly divine!

In other words, parting water, walking on water, and turning water to wine aren't really miracles, at least not miracles that are truly divine. Cora and her cronies are dismissing the miracles of Jesus as minor accomplishments beside their own. As outrageous as this seems, it's not all that different from what actually happens in the God Business. Many a preacher claims that only his religion is the real one, that other religions are false, that believers in other religions will necessarily burn in hell.

Cooley, the treasurer, used to be a preacher himself, thereby tying money and religion together again. Cooley and Schub actually discuss licensing and merchandising rights for the miracle and for Baby Joan, who discovered the miracle rock. In the interrogation, the show returns to the subject of religion during Cooley's interview. We find out that Cooley was thrown out of the pulpit -- "Because I believed... in God and they only believed in religion."

Later in the show, the council actually declares that God turned off the miracle waters because there are sick people running loose in the town, infecting the town (just as one prominent real-life televangelist declared that Florida was hit by a hurricane because God was angry at America's acceptance of gays and lesbians). The council decides to label Hapgood as an enemy of Heaven and an enemy of God himself, just as today's religious conservatives do with anyone who disagrees with them. Hapgood and the Cookies become the convenient scapegoats for the town to hate and blame for their perceived misfortune. As ridiculous and contrived as this all seems, it's exactly what happens in the real world. It's just hard for us to believe people can be that manipulative and hateful.

The I's Have It

Along with exploring conformity and non-conformity, Anyone Can Whistle also explores identity. So many of the characters in the show indulge in role playing: Hapgood as a doctor, Fay as the Lady from Lourdes, Fay as a cynic (which we find out she's not), the Cookies as pilgrims, Cora as a caring civil servant, Cora and her council as heroes, and most startling, the actors as audience at the end of Act I. Fay's inability to have fun except in costume is a comment not only on restrictive social mores and roles but also on theatre itself. Hapgood calls all the patients by his own name, swapping their identities with his own -- which is already not real. The transposition of actors and audience at the end of the first act is one of the most provocative moments in all of musical theatre. Who is the spectacle and who is the observer? The audience is traditionally considered the observers, but theatre (and especially satire) is the true observer, watching and commenting on real life, as represented by the real people in the audience. The characters on stage are crazy, but art is just imitating life; the real crazies are in the real world, and maybe there in the audience.

June and John screw with the stereotypical gender roles, with John as June's secretary even though he still pays for her dinners. They both refer to each other and to themselves in the third person, and apply the wrong gender pronouns to each other. Soon after that, Schub says he saw a man cross over from one group to the other, but Hapgood tells him it was a woman. Gender roles have been skewed now, along with everything else. And June and John also serve as a commentary on marriage; as a couple, June and John have lost their identities. The old-fashioned cliche "A woman's place is in the house," is set to rhyme against "And that is where you hang your spouse." This smashing of gender roles and loss of identity is briefly touched on again later in the show, when Hapgood says, "I chased four women in my life -- and every one of 'em caught me and tried to change me."

All There in Black and White

Anyone Can Whistle only takes one shot at racism in our culture, but it's a big shot and it's aimed better than any other satire in the show. In the interrogation, Hapgood interviews a black man named Martin. Martin's watchcry is "You can't judge a book by its cover," a clear enough condemnation of racism. But it is immediately twisted, first by bad grammar, then by a ridiculous stereotypical "negro" dialect. "Cover" becomes "cubber," a once widely used attempt at southern black dialect, that Sondheim is parodying. It sounds silly to our ears but this was once considered standard practice, in lyrics by Ira Gershwin and other top lyricists. In Porgy and Bess, in the song, "I Got Plenty o' Nuthin," the word "heaven" becomes "hebben;" and in "It Ain't Necessarily So," the word "devil" becomes "debble" (which is strange, since the characters sing V sounds in other moments in the show).

Hapgood then asks Martin what he does for a living, and Martin replies, "Going to schools, riding in busses, eating in restaurants." It becomes clear from this line that Martin's watchcry is a reference to the civil rights movement that was still going on in 1964 when Anyone Can Whistle opened, to the attempts at desegregation and ending discrimination based on color. A big part of the movement involved various sit-ins, in which black activists deliberately broke the segregation laws by going to "whites only" schools, riding in the front of buses (instead of the back, where they legally belonged), and eating in "whites only" restaurants. Of course, great strides had been made by 1964, so that's why Hapgood comments that Martin's line of work was getting rather easy. Martin replies, "Not for me. I'm Jewish," yet another group suffering from virulent racism in the 1950s and 60s. On top of everything else, Sondheim and Laurents named the character Martin, after Martin Luther King, Jr. The interview with Martin is capped off with the most brazen satire in Hapgood syllogism:

The opposite of dark is bright, The opposite of bright is dumb. So anything that's dark is dumb --

And Martin finishes it, with one more stereotype:

But they sure can hum.

When the lines are repeated, Martin ends with a new line, "Depends where you're from," commenting on the fact that racism was still worse in certain parts of the country, even though the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation ten years earlier (in 1954).

To Produce or Not To Produce

Now ask me if you should produce Anyone Can Whistle. Yes, I think you should, providing your audience is open-minded enough to enjoy an interesting, funny musical with some fairly serious flaws. Even if your audience is confused by much of the show's story, by the scattershot, hit-and-miss satire, and by the Marx Brothers style anarchy of "Simple," there are still plenty of sure-fire laughs, some beautiful songs, and the opportunity to say they've seen this rarely produced Sondheim gem. It will take some serious effort to make sense of the script and score and decisions will have to be made about how to fuse the show's two disparate styles, but despite its problems, it is a remarkable piece of musical theatre, remarkable for its ambitions, its brazen bucking of convention, its considerable charm, and the fact that it was the first Sondheim show that really gave us a glimpse at the genius of his later work. Just as its fun to see Shakespeare's early plays as much for their promise of later greatness as for their own strengths, Anyone Can Whistle provides a similar joy.

Other Resources

The script for Anyone Can Whistle is not in print and is only available from Music Theatre International when you produce the show (although perusal scripts are available if requested). The piano-vocal score and vocal selections were published but may be difficult to find these days. The original cast album is available (it was recorded after the show had already closed in 1964), and the CD reissue includes tracks not originally released on LP, including the full "Cookie Chase" and "There Won't Be Trumpets" (which was cut in previews). The 1995 Carnegie Hall concert performance, starring Bernadette Peters, Madeline Kahn, and Scott Bakula, is available on CD as well. Though the 1995 recording is a more complete recording of the score, it is missing the joy and lunacy of the original cast album, so that many people having heard only the later version find the comedy a bit heavy. The original cast (Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, and Harry Guardino) really captures the spirit of the show and that version is a lot more fun. The song "There's Always a Woman," which was written for Fay and Cora but cut from the Broadway production, is on the 1995 recording, as well as the Unsung Sondheim CD from Varese Sarabande.