SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK MUSIC THEATRE REVIEW

Stephen Sondheim: Anyone Can Whistle: Jermyn Street Theatre, London, 25.3.2010 (BBr)

Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Arthur Laurents

The Town Council:

Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper -  Issy van Randwyck

Comptroller Schub  - Alistair Robins

Treasurer Cooley  - Leo Andrew

Chief of Police Magruder  - Karl Moffatt

 

Dr Detmold’s “Cookie Jar” for the Socially Pressured:

Dr Detmold -  Nick Trumble

Nurse Fay Apple -  Rosalie Craig

Nurse -  Sophie Jugé

Townspeople/Inmates:

Richard Colvin

Lloyd Gorman

Deborah Hewitt

Sophie Jugé

Elizabeth Reid

Rhiannon Sommers

Nick Trumble

Jessica Adair

The Outsider:

J Bowden Hapgood David Ricardo-Pearce

Directed by Tom Littler

 

Tonight I went to see a play concerning the rise of a totalitarian state. Ah, yes, I hear you say, Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. You’d be wrong. If I told you that it contained songs you’d assume that it was Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. You’d be wrong again. Perhaps if I let slip the idea that it concerned an unscrupulous government who would lie and cheat to get itself out of the moral and financial bankruptcy it had created for itself you’d probably think that David Hare had written a satire about our present government. But it isn’t. As a final clue, I tell you that many of the characters are inmates at the local lunatic asylum, known as Dr Detmold’s Cookie Jar. Now you’re stumped and so would I be.

What I saw was Stephen Sondheim’s second Broadway show, Anyone Can Whistle. In some respects this is so un–Sondheim that it’s easy to see why it only achieved 9 performances on the Great White Way - despite having a cast which included Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick - but when you think about it the concept of outsiders isn’t alien to Sondheim’s way of thinking – one only has to remember his foray into what amounts to opera, Sweeney Todd, to realise this. There is another problem in that the show doesn’t contain any big hit numbers, except the title song and the magnificent There Won’t be Trumpets.

So why should we even be interested in this supposed failed show? The answer is simple – because it isn’t a failure and there’s a lot of good stuff in it, not least the knock-about farce of the hierarchy – any show which has tap dancing fascists can’t be at all negligible.

This is a production which must be seen, as much for the performances as for the material. Jermyn Street Theatre is an intimate, 70 seat, studio theatre, and this production certainly gains from the intimacy of the space.  The staging is simple, the large cast, and it appears to be large because there are many doublings, fill the space with many of them playing instruments, thus the cast becomes, from time to time, the orchestra. And then there’s the plot. Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper – brilliantly played, with great malicious delight, by Issy van Randwyck - is disliked because her administration has almost bankrupted the town. Her henchmen the lecherous Comptroller Schub – a deliciously oily turn from Alistair Robins – creepy Treasurer Cooley - Leo Andrew made up to look like an exile from a Mack Sennett movie but with menace – and Chief of Police Magruder – played with marvellous bewilderment as to his own uselessness by Karl Moffatt – create a “miracle” to bring in the people and charge them money to see it. However, they won’t let the inmates from Dr Detmold’s “Cookie Jar” attend for the simple reason that as it won’t cure, or even help them, the fraud will be exposed.

Enter Nurse Fay Apple, an idealistic young woman – a beautifully understated performance from Rosalie Craig – who wants the best for her patients who believes she can achieve it when Dr J Bowden Hapgood arrives. He seduces her, or perhaps he doesn’t, and she becomes disillusioned when it transpires that he’s just another patient – the 50^th – and has only been masquerading as a doctor. But then, Nurse Apple realises, perhaps he’s as sane as the next man. The inmates of the “Cookie Jar” are released but Cora demands they refill the place and it doesn’t matter whether it’s achieved with the sick or the well. At the end Hapgood leaves, Nurse Apple refusing go with him, but on discovering that she can whistle – a metaphor for her sexual repression, thus discovering that as she can pucker she is released from that repression – Hapgood returns and as the curtain falls we are left wondering if she will finally leave with him.

It’s certainly not a comfortable show; the subject matter is very disturbing – imagine how it must have appeared in 1964, only five years after former US President Harry S Truman declared the House Un-American Activities Committee to be the "most un-American thing in the country today" (Laurents was blacklisted in Hollywood) – but yet, with our knowledge and acceptace of satire as a regular part of  much of contemporary comedy, what emerges here is a biting satirical comedy in the manner of Brecht’s best, least didactic, work.

Much praise must go to Primavera Productions for a superb staging, epic in its simplicity, and the brilliant cast of this production for making the characters real, and not just cardboard cutouts. Musically, and this is a musical after all, this is a triumph. As the songs are so firmly integrated within the plot it’s surprising that any one of them has achieved a life of it own outside the show, but, as stated above, the title song and There Won’t be Trumpets have achieved it. Tonight we were treated to the most wonderful performances of these small masterpieces by the  incomparable Rosalie Craig – I want to hear more of her. Issy van Randwyck relished her three numbers – especially when her henchmen (stooges) would break into tap and, unbeknownst to themselves, make the whole situation as ludicrous as they themselves are. The rest of the cast, whether working together, and making a fine chorus, or in their individual roles, fleshed out their characters, making them truly believable; I knew all their back stories.

It is timely that this show should appear in celebration of Sondheim’s 80^th birthday, for it has been neglected for too long, and the great man can be well pleased with such a fine exposition of his work as this.

 

Bob Briggs