Stephen Sondheim’s early rarity “Anyone Can Whistle” (1964) has a cult following largely due to the original cast album recorded the day after its short run, at the Majestic Theater on Broadway, ended. The musical opened on April 4, that year, and closed a handful of performances later. Its stars were Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, and Harry Guardino. On March 10, this year, MasterVoices, thanks to a committed company, gave a wonderful realization, at Carnegie Hall, under Artistic Director Ted Sperling's baton, of this quirky work, in which who is who and what is what, in Arthur Laurents’ book, are often less than straight forward. The stars of this semi-staged revival were Vanessa Williams (“Into the Woods” revival, as the Witch), Elizabeth Stanley (April in “Company,” in 2006), and Santino Fontana, and Joanna Gleason (creator of the role of the Baker’s Wife, in “Into the Woods”) narrated. A couple of songs, cut from the original production, were included here.
Williams was the villain, Cora Hoover Hooper, corrupt Mayor of a declining town; Stanley, the heroic Nurse Fay Apple, charged with the care of the Cookies, who live in the Cookie Jar, “a sanitarium for the socially-pressured;” and Santino, J. Bowden Hapgood—a doctor? a patient?
Williams, supported by ‘her’ chorus boys, Mike Baerga, Dave Schoonover, Jacquez André Sims, and Matthew Steffens, gave us a rousing opening “Me and My Town,” looking at the lamentable state of her fictional village. The Mayoress and her crony, Treasurer Cooley (Eddie Cooper), cooked up a surefire tourist attraction in the “Miracle Song,” zestfully hailing the (fake) miracle of healing water pouring forth from a doctored rock, endorsed by child-mystic-in-residence, Baby Joan (Claire Sperling Waxman). In the rightfully restored “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” Stanley offered an at first understated and then expansive account of her dynamic entrance song, welcoming a future hero, and made a plan to bring the Cookies to the rock for the cure. Fontana, as Hapgood, presumed to be the new doctor coming to work at the Cookie Jar, and asked to separate the Cookies from the pilgrims, attracted by the miracle rock—forces indistinguishable from each other and both played with flair by the MasterVoices—separated them into arbitrary groups, in “Simple,” but Cora was taken with him, as was almost everyone else, including Fay.
With little faith in the miracle, Fay disguised herself as the Lady from Lourdes—an identity that frees her to “Relax, let go, let fly,” apart from her efficient head nurse persona—come from France to investigate the miracle’s authenticity, and Stanley flirted with Fontana’s Hapgood in a deliciously breezy ‘Come Play Wiz Me.” In the wistful title song, completely free from razzmatazz, Stanley brought down the house. Impressed as she saw her sleepy little borough brimming with activity, Williams’ Cora concluded, with enthusiasm, “(there’s) A Parade in Town.” In “Everybody Says Don’t,” the propulsive expression of his credo to try what’s forbidden, Hapgood advised Fay to free the Cookies by tearing up their records, which straitlaced Nurse Apple refused to do.
Fearing exposure by the dastardly Lady-in-red from Lourdes, Williams and cronies Comptroller Schub (Douglas Sills), Cooley, and Police Chief Magruder (Michael Mulheren) breezily plotted, in “I’ve Got You to Lean On,” to shut down their phony miracle. When nearly everyone turned against Stanley’s Fay, and Fontana’s Hapgood came out to her as her patient, not a doctor, she offered a lively plaint, “See What It Gets You,” incorporating an upbeat reprise of “Anyone Can Whistle.” To strains of Viennese-style waltzes, in “The Cookie Chase,” including a quartet, begun a cappella, for Joan Harris, Link Lauren, Mikhail Pontenila, and Robert Reichstein, and a soprano solo for Nicole Goldstein, Williams charged her officials with rounding up everyone who is or might be a Cookie, urging “Lock ’em up,” much the way another recent corrupt office holder bade his followers to lock up the candidate who ran against him, and Stanley, in a change of heart, encouraged the Cookies, to “run for your lives.” There was a segue directly into the restored “There’s Always a Woman,” a caustic ‘bitch’ duet, on the order of “Bosom Buddies” and any number of Italian operatic soprano and mezzo-soprano duets, in which the two leading ladies reveled. When obliged to give the authorities the names of the Cookies, Stanley gave last names like Mozart, Brecht, and Einstein, with ordinary American first names.
Wrapping up their stories, Stanley and Fontana engaged in a tender duet, “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” meant to be a farewell—but … —and investigating a new miracle in a neighboring town, Williams and Sills celebrated a future together in a reprise of “I’ve Got You to Lean On.”
Thank you, MasterVoices, for this miraculous revelation.