As I continue to prepare to direct next month's production of Anyone Can Whistle at the Prince Music Theater, I jotted down a few thoughts for a reporter who's doing a column on me and the show. I reproduce them here for what they're worth:
Anyone Can Whistle opened in the early 60's, at the end of the very conformist 1950's (the era of the Hollywood blacklist which Arthur Laurents describes vividly in his memoir "Original Story By"), and its message is a non-conformist one. It's a dystopian fantasy with overtones of The Cradle Will Rock, 1984 and Urinetown, set in a down-at-heels town run by a ruthless mayor and a troika of nasty advisors. The ruling elite is well off, even though the town itself has fallen on hard times - a state of affairs not too different from the present day, one could say. In this town, there is a local sanitarium called the "Cookie Jar" which is actually a lock-up where the "socially pressured' are kept quarantined. Who are the Cookies? All the interesting people in the town, as it turns out - thinkers, activists, artists, dancers, musicians, homosexuals, people of color - anyone, in short, who is different in appearance or ideology from the conservatives who are in charge. The play can be seen as a parable of liberalism vs conservatism: the conservatives are wealthy, mean and concerned with protecting what they've got, while the liberals are diverse, interesting and given to quixotic ventures. The heroine of the story is the head nurse at the Cookie Jar, a woman named Fay Apple, who tries to set her Cookies free, with the help of a Mysterious Stranger named J. Bowden Hapgood who arrives in town during the first act and is embraced as a sort of Messiah. As it turns out, Hapgood is another Cookie, but a charming rogue nonetheless, and Fay falls in love with him.
Through the course of the action, Fay strives to keep her Cookies out of the Jar, but her efforts are ultimately foiled by the machinations of the Mayor and her Controller. The play leaves us with the idea that the world needs crazy people, that its vitality depends on people who don't think in lockstep with the powers that be.
The main reason for doing ACW is the score, which is widely regarded as ingenious, sophisticated and ahead of its time (its contemporaries are Fiddler On The Roof, Funny Girl and Hello Dolly). The book is considered a bit of a problem, and reviews of recent revivals (in Los Angeles at the Matrix Theater and in London at the Bridewell, both in 2003) suggest that today's theatergoers are still likely to find the show overstuffed with ideas and inconsistent in tone, veering wildly from wacky to pretentious. Personally, I wish there was a way to fix the ending to bring it more in line with my own liberal agenda. There's no way of ignoring the fact that the Cookie Jar is more gulag than asylum - nearly all its inmates yearn to be free - and what are we to make of an ending where the bad guys go scot-free while the artists and thinkers wind up helpless behind bars? That's way too much like real life. The efforts of Hapgood and Fay don't really seem to change the status quo, which is much the same at the end of the story as it is at the beginning. The piece has got its dramaturgical challenges, and I don't know how much hope there is of effecting meaningful improvements on its most glaring problems.
Meanwhile, I find myself wondering if there isn't a way to treat the variety of tone in ACW as a feature rather than a bug in this production, much like Assassins does. As director of the Prince's production, my first job is to make sure that the piece is well-sung and as well-acted as it can be, then to make sure the tone of each section is clear and to manage the transition between contrasting sections in a way that keeps the audience abreast of the authors' complex point of view. It'll be a big challenge, and an exciting one.
