AN ANALYSIS
by
Scott Miller
Marcus Aurelius said "The object of life is not to be on the side of
the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Anyone
Can Whistle, an absurdist social satire about insanity and conformity (among
a dozen other things) is probably the bravest show Stephen Sondheim wrote, at
least until Assassins. It was a show
that forced critics and audiences to think differently about musicals, to
consider them in the same thoughtful, serious way as non-musicals. It was also a
spectacular flop when it first hit Broadway in 1964, running only nine
performances before closing.
After writing lyrics for West Side
Story and Gypsy, Sondheim had made his Broadway debut as a composer in 1962
with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Forum, but it was with Anyone Can
Whistle two years later that the world saw the first glimpse of Sondheim's
rebel genius. The show had a book by Arthur Laurents, who had written the books
for West Side Story and Gypsy,
but Whistle’s plot was too
unconventional and wickedly satiric to find an audience while elsewhere on
Broadway people could see more pleasant, easier to understand shows like Hello
Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, and Funny
Girl. As Sondheim and Laurents set to work writing Whistle,
Laurents wrote, “This will be something very different in musicals, very
strange and zany. It will be contemporary, satirical and kind of far-out.”
Sondheim's score for Whistle
was a quirky blend of the kind of dissonant, electrifying music he would use
more confidently in Company (1970) and
his other later shows, along with a deft takeoff of traditional show tunes to
point up the insincerity and shallowness of some of the characters.
Unfortunately, since it made fun of the people in the audience, as well as the
kind of show tunes they most enjoyed, the show met with more hostility than
excitement. The New York Times began
its review with the statement "There is no law against saying something in
a musical, but it's unconstitutional to omit imagination and wit." John
Chapman, in the Daily News, called the
first act "joyously daffy" but didn't much like the rest. But John
McClain, in the Journal-American
praised the show and reported that the opening night audience liked the show so
much that they cheered in the midst of several numbers. Writing in the New
York World Telegram & Sun, critic Norman Nadel said, “Were I a less
inhibited creature, I’d spend the next month hurling roses at the Majestic
Theatre [where Anyone Can Whistle opened]. . . You have no idea how many
breath-taking surprises are in store for you in the Arthur Laurents-Stephen
Sondheim musical. At a time when even the good musicals look a little or a lot
like something out of a recent season, it is exciting to encounter one so
spectacularly original.” Critic Whitney Bolton wrote, “If Anyone Can
Whistle is a success, the American musical theatre will have advanced itself
and prepared the way for further breakdown of now old and worn techniques and
points of view. . . It is a bright step toward a more enlightened and cerebral
musical theatre, a musical theatre in which that kind of show can say something
about its times and the mores of those times. . . The musical theatre is less
ponderous today because of Anyone Can Whistle, no matter what its
fate.”
But nothing can make up for a bad review in the Times.
It closed a week later. Perhaps if it had played the still new off-Broadway, it
might have fared better. Throughout the years since its opening, critics have
cited its short run as proof of its lack of quality, but being commercial and
being good aren’t always the same thing.
Still, because of a cast album recorded after the show had already
closed, Anyone Can Whistle became a
cult favorite over the years. Sondheim has admitted it has serious flaws,
despite its considerable charm and humor. The show tells the story of a town
that's gone bankrupt because its only industry is manufacturing something that
never wears out. In order to revive her town Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper and her
town council fake a miracle -- water flowing from a rock -- to attract tourists.
When patients at the local mental hospital, the Cookie Jar, escape and mix with
the townspeople and tourists, chaos ensues. Somehow, Sondheim and Arthur
Laurents managed to add in a love story as well, between J. Bowden Hapgood, a
psychiatrist who isn't really a psychiatrist, and Fay Apple, a nurse at the
Cookie Jar who disguises herself as a miracle verifier sent from Lourdes. In
addition to the outrageous subject matter and sharp social commentary, the
three-act show also included a ground-breaking, complex, thirteen-minute
integrated musical sequence, incongruously titled “Simple,” that ended the
first act. Whistle was not just
breaking the rules of traditional musical comedy, it was thumbing its nose at
them – and, bravely, also at its audience.
It didn't help that the show's competition on Broadway that year included
more traditional, crowd pleasing musicals. With a delicious sense of irony,
Sondheim rewrote history in one scene of his 1981 show biz musical Merrily
We Roll Along. The central character, a fictional Broadway composer named
Frank Shepard, gets his (fictional) first hit show on Broadway in that same 1964
season. As he and his friends celebrate their success in the theatre lobby with
the song "It's a Hit," his producer declares their hit show is even
better than Funny Girl, Fiddler, and Hello,
Dolly combined. Anyone
Can Whistle was finally vindicated, if only fictionally. Yet in the ultimate
twist of fate, Merrily We Roll Along
only ran sixteen performances.
The
Trouble with Hapgood
Anyone Can Whistle
is almost two musicals. It's part absurdist social satire, breaking the fourth
wall, acknowledging itself as theatre, rejecting naturalism and sometimes even
conventional 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 halves. The show's dual nature is beautifully
illustrated by its title. Originally it was to be called The
Natives Are Restless, but then changed to Side
Show (promotional materials still exist with that title). The title was
finally changed to Anyone Can Whistle,
emphasizing the love story equally with the social satire.
Even the basic structure of the show is unusual. First, it's in three
acts, which is very rare for musicals. Second, the central conflict established
in the first song – 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. The absurdist satire
(personified by the Cookies) is gleefully mixed up with the traditional Broadway
musical (in the persons of the "normal" people). And then, there's another
central conflict, which is Fay's inability to express her feelings to Hapgood.
The score also has a split personality. 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 –
and these songs 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) 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, in Assassins,
and in other shows. In every case, the use of pastiche removes the song from the
strange reality of musical comedy, in which people break out into song and no
one notices, and it turns the song into a commentary.
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). 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 later. 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 production number 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 musical comedy is. 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 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, this
water from a rock is. The song's lyric repeats the phrase "The Lord
said..." making it sound even more like a 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. But with
today’s multi-millionaire televangelists, the idea of people making money off
of the public’s religious beliefs may not be as far-fetched as it was in 1964.
The song "There Won't Be Trumpets" was cut in the original
production because it came after a long, comic speech by Fay. This is the first
song in the show that is not pastiche. It begins with a furious, dissonant
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 Fay’s hero 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 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.
"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.
The musical and verbal chaos of this extended musical scene 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, and lights come up pointing into the
audience's eyes, blinding them as the stage lights go down. When the stage
lights come up again, mere seconds later, the cast is seated in theatre seats
onstage, laughing, applauding, and pointing at the audience in 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?
Act
II
After the "A-1 March," at the top of Act II, 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 has used in several of his shows. 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. 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. The song is also teeming with syncopation, delayed
downbeats, and blues harmonies, a kind of risqué, 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 a
(semi-) traditional show tune and not the kind of full romantic music Sondheim
is saving for genuine emotions.
The title song, "Anyone Can Whistle," is one of those songs of
genuine emotion, no artifice, no cleverness, and so it's pure romantic Sondheim.
There's no pastiche here, no commentary. This song has the simplest
accompaniment in the score, a musical illustration of the lyric, which describes
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 that 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, cliché-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 clichés), 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 trying to hide their sadness, and that's ultimately what makes
Bobby, George, and Fay so much more moving than tragic characters in other
musicals.
After a brief return to Cora and another of her pastiche numbers, this
time the Sousa-esque "There's a Parade in Town," the show comes back
again to the love story as Fay and Hapgood decide what to do about the Cookies'
predicament. 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. "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.
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" (reportedly written by dance
arranger Betty Walberg, not by Sondheim) is an extremely long, very strange
piece that has often been cut or cut down in later productions. 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." At one point, it imitates the West
Side Story prologue musically and percussively, and it's unclear whether
this is an intentional imitation, as a joke or maybe 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. She 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 public 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 on
the action, 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 makes dramatic sense and provides some musical
continuity. 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 dance break.
When the council turns off the miracle and declares it Hapgood's fault,
the crowd turns on Hapgood, 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 it 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."
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 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).
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 brief quote of "Come
Play Wiz Me," a reminder of how all this started, and then the main body of
the song is one of Sondheim's most lush, beautiful melodies. 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."
Mad
as Hell
The old cliché that only the insane can see 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 authors’ 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
subversive 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 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
Senator 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?"
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 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 audience) are indicted for
putting people like them 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 organized religion – not God, really, just religion.
"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 a 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 religious leaders
claim that only their religion is the real one, that other religions are false,
that believers in other religions will necessarily burn in eternal damnation.
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
fake miracle rock. During 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 a few
years ago 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. This is perhaps Whistle’s
most accurate and therefore most dangerous satire.
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, the
Cookies as pilgrims, Cora as a caring civil servant, Cora and her council as
heroes, and most startling, the actors as the 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 the
Cookies by his own name, swapping their identities with his own identity, which
is already not real – or perhaps it’s more
real after the swap since he’s actually a Cookie. 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 they are there in the audience.
During the interrogation, June and John mess 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, 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 cliché "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 is not an
easy show to deal with and it's going to make some people in the audience
uncomfortable (as many of the best shows do), but it has some extremely
important social messages in it, woven in and out of the craziness – that
independence is not the same as insanity (especially important nowadays as half
the kids in schools are being put on Ritalin), that religion and government can
be easily corrupted, that most people would rather do what they're told instead
of using their brains, etc. Anyone Can
Whistle is, first and foremost, making fun of and challenging the status
quo, and it does this, at times, viciously.
One of the topics the show addresses (though only briefly) is racism and
White America’s opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.
The idea with the Martin sequence in the song “Simple” is that Martin (named
for Martin Luther King, Jr.) has been put in the Cookie Jar for being a civil
rights activist. Apparently, he has been labeled “crazy” for demanding that
he be able to ride in the front of the bus, that he be able to eat in a
“whites only” restaurant, that his kids be able to go to a “whites only”
school. Many people in the 1950s and 1960s really did believe that Martin Luther
King, Jr. and other black leaders were crazy, and those people certainly would
have preferred that King be locked up in an asylum like the Cookie Jar rather
than utterly changing the face of America the way he did. On one level, the
satire here is very funny; on another level it's scary, potent social
commentary. It’s scary and aggressive enough that it may well offend members
of the audience.
Most of White America in 1964 (when Whistle
was written and when it's set) refused to see that black Americans were being discriminated against. They
thought the blossoming civil rights movement was crazy, that it was a big deal
over nothing. In his book Right from the
Beginning, frequent presidential candidate Pat Buchanan wrote, “In the
late 1940s and 1950s . . . race was never a preoccupation with us, we rarely
thought about it . . . There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify
every slight. The Negroes of Washington had their public schools, restaurants,
bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours.” That's how
most white Americans thought back then, that the blacks had nothing to complain
about.
So in Whistle, we're to believe
that Martin was part of the civil rights movement and was locked up as a crazy
man for what he was doing. And note that, like Martin, the names of the other
Cookies are also many of the great thinkers of Western Civilization – Freud,
Gandhi, Kierkegaard, Susan B. Anthony – people who really shook things up and
changed the world.
In
the “Simple” interrogation, Hapgood interviews Martin, a black man whose
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, a convention that Sondheim is parodying. It
sounds silly to our ears but this was once considered standard practice, in
theatre lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, 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). In fact, even the accompanying music for the Martin sequence parodies the
music of Porgy and Bess, and its
perhaps unintentional racism, underlining the satire.
Hapgood 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 the ending of
discrimination based on race. 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 were legally forced to sit), and eating in "whites
only" restaurants. Of course, some progress had been made by 1964, so
that's why Hapgood comments that Martin's line of work was getting rather easy.
This also comments on White America’s perception in 1964 that all the ills of
racism had been cured already. When Hapgood asks him if his work is getting
easy, Martin replies, "Not for me. I'm Jewish," invoking yet another group suffering from virulent racism in the 1950s and 60s.
The extra punch line is reminds us that even when we address one form of
discrimination, America always has another form of discrimination waiting in
line. Martin has a double fight. The racism against Jews was also pervasive at
that time. It wasn't as bad as the racism against blacks, partly because many
Jews could "pass" for being non-Jews, while most blacks couldn't pass
for white. But marriage between Jews and non-Jews was still illegal in many
states in 1964. This line also satirizes the fact that in most cities there was
great hatred between blacks and Jews; these two groups that were both
discriminated against were also practicing racism against each other.
The interview with Martin is capped off with the most brazen satire, in
Hapgood’s 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.
Certainly,
this is enough to offend enormously anybody who doesn’t understand that this
is satire, that in fact Sondheim is making fun of the prejudices and shallowness
of White America. Hapgood is making fun of the widespread “conventional
wisdom” of that time that blacks couldn't possibly be as intelligent, as
"evolved" as whites. His “logic” sounds offensive to us now, but
that was really how many Americans thought. They thought black people could
never be as intelligent or educated as whites – but they still thought blacks
were great entertainers ("but they sure can hum"). Evidence of this is
in recently released live recordings of performances in the 1950s by Frank
Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. in Las Vegas. Sinatra and Martin let
loose some of the most racist, offensive jokes you’ve ever heard about Davis,
jokes that were considered “innocent” at the time but that we now recognize
as horrific. White America was happily ignorant of what African Americans were
facing every day.
When Hapgood’s syllogism is repeated for a second time (this time with
Martin in the lead, and others singing back-up), 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 (like the deep South), even though
the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation ten years earlier, in 1954. The laws
had changed but the lynchings hadn’t stopped.
There is the temptation to cut this sequence when producing Anyone
Can Whistle, because if it isn’t played exactly right, if it isn’t
absolutely crystal clear that Hapgood and Martin’s conversation is satire,
black audience members may feel profoundly insulted. But cutting it means
assuming the audience isn’t smart enough to understand. Film and Broadway
actor Laurence Luckinbill once said to me, “Always over-estimate the
public’s intelligence. They will thank you for it.” If there was ever a time
to follow that advice, it seems Anyone Can
Whistle is it.
Subtle Is as Subtle Does
Certainly
subtlety is not what Anyone Can Whistle is known for. In fact, many
critics complain that the show is too heavy-handed in its satire. But absurdism
is rarely a subtle style of theatre, and these criticisms don’t take into
account the style of the show. They judge Whistle not on its own terms
but on terms they impose upon it. Contrary to popular opinion, there are many
funny, subtle moments in Anyone Can Whistle.
For
instance, early in the show, Cora refers to Schub's failed attempt at a Peer
Gynt festival, and this line which feels like a throwawayt is actually a
very funny joke. There is actually an annual Peer Gynt festival in
Norway, so Schub obviously heard of it and thought it would be a big seller.
What's funny about all this is that the story of Peer Gynt is about a
charming but selfish guy (Hapgood anyone?) who goes around causing trouble, but
a sweet girl who's in love with him (Fay?) keeps bailing him out. He even spends
time in a mental asylum (the Cookie Jar?). And in the end, the story becomes
about finding your place in the world, figuring out what you're put here to do
– a major theme in Whistle. Though this is just a throwaway comment by
Cora, it's very funny specifically because Peer Gynt has interessting
parallels to Whistle.
Though
the June and John sequence make the issue of gender roles very obvious, this
theme is woven thoughout the show. In Act II, Schub tells Fay that he's “the
most important man in town, next to the Mayoress,” and later that Fay should
“accept defeat like a gentleman.” Cora says to the town council, “No
wonder you have a lady mayor, you male impersonators!” During the song
“Simple,” Schub says that a man crossed over, but Hapgood corrects him –
it was a woman. Comments like these are peppered throughout the script.
Another
moment frequently missed is when Fay and Hapgood's comic sexual escapades are
foreshadowed by Baby Joan. When we first meet Baby Joan, she begins licking the
miracle rock, which then spurts forth water, and then Fay tells Baby Joan to go
home and change her wet panties! That can’t be an accident, and if played
right, that will always elicit a giggle or two.
The
following dialogue exchange appears baffling at first, but when played right,
it’s as clear as day and important to the plot..
Hapgood:
I see your problem. And mine. Yesterday mine would have upset me but today --
I'll have fun solving it!
Schub: Fun? I'm not
following.
Hapgood: No, you're leading.
That is, you were. But now I shall.
This exchange sets up “Simple” and it also foreshadows Hapgood's secret. The idea that solving the problem would have upset Hapgood is explained later when Hapgood tells Fay why he quit his job as advisor to the president. The bit about leading and following is Hapgood's way of telling Schub that though Schub was in charge, once Hapgood agrees to solve their problem, he will be in charge from then on. Hapgood will be the one with power, and he will take over the town – exactly as he does.
There's also a wonderful line a bit earlier when Hapgood, who is dancing
with Cora, tells Schub he thinks best on his feet: “Well, usually I walk. But
when I don't want to get anywhere, I dance.” In other words, Hapgood will
pretend to help Cora and Schub but he doesn't actually intend to “get
anywhere.” He intends to leave things just as mixed up as they are when he
begins.
The
lyric to “See What It Gets You” may be the best lyric in the show. It so
exactly describes what Hapgood has done to Fay and how it has affected her. He
has encouraged her to be strong, to take action, and when she does, he bails on
her and refuses to help. He teaches her to live life to the fullest, to break he
rules, and then he disappears. He teaches her how to love someone but doesn't
intend to stay. And once he's opened her eyes to all this, she can never go back
to her happy, sheltered ignorance again. She has been waiting for a hero upon
whom to depend, and now that she has one, she has to learn to go it alone.
Listen to that lyric again – it's one of the most jam-packed, plot-specific
songs Sondheim has written.
The
list of Cookies' names at the end is one of the most fun moments in the show.
The first names are ordinary names but the last names are those of famous people
who (famously) broke the rules, some well-known like Mozart, Freud, Gandhi,
Dillinger, Susan B. Anthony, but also some less immediately recognizable to
audiences, like Jorgenson (Christine Jorgenson the first world-renowned
transsexual), Lafitte (the pirate), Brecht (the German director), and the
philosophers Kierkegaard and Engels. All of these people fit the
description Fay gives us of the Cookies – “people who made other people
nervous by leading individual lives.”
Getting
It In the End
The end of Anyone Can Whistle pulls together – unexpectedly – all the
craziness that has come before it. After everyone has run off after the miracle
in the next town over, Cora stands alone in the town square with no one to boss,
no one to adore her, no one to cower before her, no one to owe her anything.
Schub joins her and together they hatch one last scheme. Cora wishes for another
miracle but Schub understands that the world doesn't need another miracle; what
it needs is a refuge for those who've been disappointed by fake miracles. He
sees that everyone in town (and in the world?) has gone crazy - crazy with
religious fervor, crazy with love, crazy with greed, crazy with lynch mob
mentality, crazy with the promise of a new miracle - and, ever the shrewd
businessman, he sees a need worth filling.
With the Cookie Jar so full the cookies are sleeping in shifts, he
realizes that all the town's empty factories and warehouses, all the homes left
empty by people chasing the new miracle, all the stores devoid of customers, and
city hall now bereft of its town council, the one thing this town has is space.
He and Cora have finally found the scheme to end all schemes (and fittingly,
it's underscored by music from "I've Got You to Lean On"): they'll
turn the whole town into an insane asylum.
And we can't help but remember one of the opening lines of the show,
which tells us the town went bankrupt because it manufactured a product that
never wore out. Suddenly, we've come full circle. Surely, insanity is a product
that never wears out. Cora and Schub have manufactured plenty of that over the
course of the show and they've unwittingly created their own customer base for
their newest enterprise. They created a world full of loonies and they can now
make their fortunes by turning their town into one big looney bin. This also
connects us back to Hapgood's offhand remark earlier in Act III that Cora and
Schub were the "king and queen of madmen." Now they really will be.
And magically, Sondheim and Laurents have tied together all the various
targets of satire throughout the whole show. All the craziness of the world -
the political corruption, the commercialization of religion, the racism, the
sexism, the deceit, the scheming has driven us all collectively insane, Whistle
is saying, to the point where the world itself has become one big, enormous
looney bin, where each one of us is just as crazy as our neighbors, where
insanity has become the norm, and where we're constantly chasing the next
miracle cure, the next easy fix, the next quick answer to all our problems. And,
quite literally now, the inmates are running the asylum.
Why
Do It?
Anyone Can Whistle is a remarkable piece of musical theatre,
remarkable for its ambitions, its brazen bucking of convention, its considerable
charm, its non-stop hilarity, 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. This show is an incredibly complex. crazy,
angry musical, but it's one that people need to see.
When it opened in 1964, it was so bizarre in its style, so savage in its
satire, so ruthless in its social commentary that it ran only nine performances.
It attacked the commercialization of religion (which still persists today), the
gender and racial stereotypes that go unchallenged (still today), and the
blatant corruption and profiteering of politicians (which is worse today than
ever). In short, it attacked the way its audiences lived their lives. No wonder
it closed in a week.
But the truth is those lives deserved attack, and our lives today deserve
the attack even more. How is it that we condone the fact that religious titans
Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jesse Jackson are millionaires and live in
mansions? What would Jesus or Gandhi have said about that? How do we condone the
outrageous black stereotypes that still pervade television and movies? What
would Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. have said about the
over-sexed, drugged-out, brainless comedies full of negative stereotypes that
African American writers and actors are churning out week after week? How do we
condone the fact that the president of the United States, a card carrying member
of the oil industry, wants to drill in the Arctic Natural Preserve, so he and
his friends can make money? Is he all that different from Mayoress Cora Hoover
Hooper?
Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents address these outrages by shining
the harsh light of satire on them, exaggerating them and making the insanity and
insidiousness of these practices crystal clear to us all. Cora’s fake miracle
gets us thinking about Dubya and his oil buddies. The black woman Martha’s
stereotypical Hollywood “black” dialect and her musical references to Porgy
and Bess make us recognize how readily we accept black stereotypes in
everyday life – still today – without even realizing it. June and John’s
gender bending shows us how silly and out-dated gender roles are in our society
and how far we haven’t come since
the 1950s. Fay’s sex-only-by-disguise points up the hypocrisy and hang-ups
Americans have over sex. The Cookies themselves show us how quickly we label any
deviation from the norm as a sickness or disability of some sort.
Yes, this show may offend audiences a little, but if that’s the only
way to get us all thinking about what’s wrong with our culture, then so be it.
Our world is a mess and if we can laugh at how ridiculous we all are, maybe
tomorrow we can start making changes. Anyone
Can Whistle creates a strange relationship between the observers and the
observed. The audience sits watching the kooky inhabitants of Cora’s town but Anyone
Can Whistle is also watching us, noticing every prejudice, every injustice,
every ridiculous and selfish move we make in our everyday lives. And at the end
of Act I, we’re forced to ask the literal question: who’s watching whom?
So why is the show called Anyone
Can Whistle? After all, New York University philosophy professor Charles
Shaw told the New York Times in 1931, “Whistling is an unmistakable sign of the
moron No great or successful man
ever whistles. No, it's only the inferior and maladjusted individual who ever
seeks emotional relief in such a bird-like act as that of whistling.” Catholic
schoolgirls used to be told that their whistling would make the Blessed Virgin
weep. The title of the show is about the choices we make, about whether we do
what we’re told or choose instead to go our own merry way. Whistling is a
symbol of freedom, abandon, fun, stubborn nonconformity, and fun. Most people
don’t chase after those things. But anyone can.
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 a longer
"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 better
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.
A
shorter version of this essay appears in Rebels
with Applause: Broadway’s Ground-Breaking Musicals by Scott Miller, due to
be released in September 2001 by Heinemann Publishing. Copyright 1999. All
rights reserved. Scott Miller is also the author of two other books on musical
theatre, From Assassins to West Side Story
and Deconstructing Harold Hill, and
the novel In the Blood.