Anyone Can Whistle (1964 Original Broadway Cast) [Cast Recording, Extra tracks, Original recording remastered, Soundtrack]

Stephen Sondheim (Artist), Angela Lansbury (Artist), Lee Remick (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (May 13, 2003)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Cast Recording, Extra tracks, Original recording remastered, Soundtrack
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B0000996G0
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #48,874 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Give credit (and thanks) to Goddard Lieberson and Columbia Records for preserving the original cast recording of Anyone Can Whistle despite a blink-and-you-missed-it run of nine performances in 1964. That's often blamed on the challenging and confusing book, which features a Mayoress (Angela Lansbury) whose town is economically depressed until the fortuitous arrival of an apparent miracle. Unfortunately, the resulting influx of tourists clashes with 49 patients (known as "cookies") from a local mental hospital led by nurse Fay Apple (Lee Remick) when a traveling physician named Hapgood (Harry Guardino) arrives to sort things out. The score is fascinating early Stephen Sondheim and includes numerous songs that have become staples of Sondheim song collections: "There Won't Be Trumpets," the gentle title tune, "A Parade in Town," "Everybody Says Don't," and "With So Little to Be Sure Of." Almost exactly 31 years later, Anyone Can Whistle was recorded as a gala benefit concert, with 20 additional minutes of music and dialogue, an all-star cast including Lansbury and Bernadette Peters, and the excitement of a live performance. For heart, though, it still doesn't measure up to the original cast recording. --David Horiuchi

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply delightful!, May 29, 2006

By 

James Head (NC, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Anyone Can Whistle (1964 Original Broadway Cast) (Audio CD)

Simply put, ANYONE CAN WHISTLE is just delightful. It's a shame that it wasn't seen as such in its own day and time, because Sondheim's music and lyrics are first-rate.

Originally having opened on Broadway on April 4, 1964, the show quickly folded, closing on April 11, 1964 after only nine short performances. Why this happened is a mystery to me, but some attribute it to the time in which the show was extant, the perhaps confusing book by Laurents, and other factors. The key here is that each of these factors were less related to the show itself and more to the unchangeable things of the day. In the end, it's a great shame that ANYONE... closed; just have a listen to this CD and see for yourself.

Angela Lansbury, marvelous as ever, stars as Cora Hoover Hooper, the mayoress of a small town facing one problem after another. She laments how her "peasants" detest her in "Me and My Town." Along with her town council, she hatches a not-so-brilliant but strikingly humorous plan to revive the town's economy in "Miracle Song." In an effort to prove this "miracle" a farce, Nurse Fay Apple (played by Lee Remick) gathers her patients from the local sanitarium, in an effort to confront the Mayoress and out her scheme. J. Bowden Hapgood, a sham psychoanalyst, arrives on the scene and separates the town into groups, claiming that he can tell who is sane and who is crazy -- the only problem is, he refuses to tell anyone!

While a bit complex at times, and often goofy, ANYONE... has become a cult classic in spite of (and perhaps in part due to) it being a financial flop. Ahead of its time in many ways, it's a shame that even now, some forty years later, there has yet to be a true revival.

All-in-all, the vocal performances here are superb. Lansbury is deliciously devious as the Mayoress, Remick is strong and powerful as Nurse Fay Apple, and Harry Guardino is hilarious as the misguided Hapgood.

It's a shame that they don't make them like this anymore -- in spite of it not being a success in 1964, this is truly one of the most fascinating and funny scores that classic Broadway has to offer. Very highly recommended.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gone but never forgotten, January 26, 2004

By 

Mark Andrew Lawrence "Theatre Reviewer" (Toronto) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Anyone Can Whistle (1964 Original Broadway Cast) (Audio CD)

Goddard Lieberson was a genius! He knew how to translate this complex score to records and still make a listenable package! In fact when it came to recording flops it seems he took even greater care.

It's easy to see why WHISTLE failed in 1964. It was totally out-of-step with the other hit musicals: HELLO DOLLY!, FUNNY GIRL, etc. Not that it was in any way inferior to these shows...quite the opposite. It was, if anything, too intelligent, and the score too complicated. That is why the recording stands up to repeated listenings. Still you can imagine your average middle-aged, middle class theatre going going out for intermission after the amazing song/scene "Simple" totally baffled! If they came back for Act Two (doubtful) they certainly did not hang around for Act Three. Yet they would have missed one of Sondheim's most beautiful songs: "With So Little To Be Sure Of."

There's more gold in ths score: The title song is well know, but Lansbury's three solo's are wonderful especially "A Parade in Town." And the comic "Come Play Wiz Me" is great fun...though it sounds similar to the old Peter Sellers-Sophia Loren single "Goodness Gracious Me." Did Sondheim take his inspiration from that old comedy song or was it the other way around? No matter..both are fun!

Then there are the extended musical scenes: "Simple", "The Miracle Song" and the ballet "The Cookie Chase."

One person has wondered why "There's Always a Woman" was not recorded. The answer is simple: the song was dropped from the show long before opening night (although it was restored for the 1995 concert.) Lee Remick's "There Won't Be Trumpets" was also cut just before opening night. That it was recorded at all is a miracle. (The track did not make the original LP release, but is included on this CD.)

As always, Sony has done a wonerdful remastering job. Sondheim's many fans will want to hear the composer's demo recordings of some of the dropped songs, but the key reason to get this Cd is the still wonderful original cast performances. True, none of the leads have truly outstanding singing voices, but they are so loaded with character that it hardly matters.

Ther has always been talk of revising and reviving ANYONE CAN WHISTLE and when you listen to this cast album you'll understand why.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars COOKIE JAR, January 31, 2007

By 

Momix - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anyone Can Whistle (1964 Original Broadway Cast) (Audio CD)

What a complex, unexpected, unwelcome show for 1960s Broadway! And how fascinating to hear it today thanks to the, as ever, fine Goddard Lieberson produced OBC Album; a prized museum piece.

Arthur Laurence (a McCarthy witch-hunt-victim) must have been embittered, eager to retaliate with a vengeance here; and his sophisticated, ever willing to innovate and experiment, young collaborator Stephen Sondheim backed him up with a (some of them, indeed bizarre!) mixed bag of musical numbers. The impetus ranges from Brecht, Offenbach, Viennese Operetta through the likes of Ionesco, Pinter to the more conventional (Me and My Town recalls the Marilyn & Boys "Heat Wave"; "Come Play Wiz Me", the saucy Sellers/Loren doctor song). All told, a Broadway musical imposing such adamant, incisive, lunatic angle on US executive corruption was then, indeed, audacious at all risks.

The core of this (then doomed) effort is the number called "Simple"... and simple it is not at all: an extended, frantic, absurd, sardonic ensemble-scene leading to the end-of-Act-One "you are all mad" idea where the audience were impelled to see themselves as reflected on a mirror, lights on the house, the actors on stage facing and applauding them. What would today audiences see? Do they acceed to (and welcome) experiment and innovation so much more nowadays, as Sondheim's later (comparable) opus, ASSASSINS finally and successfully evolved from 'Off' to 'On' Broadway stage?

Recording sessions must have been sweaty for Lieberson, for Sondheim, not the least for musical director Herbert Greene, as principal love couple struggled to comply with their pitch range, syncopations, machine-gun lyrics and proper voice technique as well as the required emotion. Lots of the latter abounds though, not unlike every original cast album recorded days after its premiere, this one recorded the day after the show folded! And quite a cookie chase it had been: sundry internal squabbles during previews; director Laurents' continual --desperate, stubborn-- re-stagings and cuts (like the marvelous "There's Always A Woman" which Kaye Ballard and Sally Mayes recently recorded beautifully in the album "Unsung Sondheim"); the quarrels between producers and creators (a fist-fight is legendary); an actor's death of heart attack during rehearsals... Whatever, the Sondheim Cult has proclaimed this album 'a must' and so it must be.

'Whistle' producers' later comments that neither Guardino or Remick could sing are exaggerated; flaws included, they could deliver a song with plenty of charisma. And a little less Sondheim tough, convoluted writing might have eased it all. Exquisite blue-eyed Lee Remick, whose acting talents rendered every word she sang so clearly defined and felt, couldn't cope with the syncopated vocal line in most of "There Won't Be Trumpets" but we can forgive her, after all, the song was cut for the premiere and, although recorded, also from the 1964 released vynil album. (Had they computer mixing and Pro-Tools facilities then, some of Remick's voice track could have easily been shifted to fit the orchestra; also some pitching repair would have delivered them all flawless.) Whatever, I never heard a more moving rendition of "Anyone Can Whistle" than Remick's (or Sondheim's own voice & piano bonus track demo). That Guardino couldn't utter "Everybody Says Don't" very fast was not such a sin then, as the world hadn't as yet experienced Sondheim's virtuoso speedy lyrics ("Getting Married Today" or the Seurat-inspired numbers for Patinkin were still in God's mind... let alone the Ballad of Czgolgosz.....) still, Guardino's singing is ripe, heavy-cigaretted and seducingly charming... The renderings of his songs in the 1995 Carnegie Hall Concert Revival sound epicene in comparison.

Last but not least, Angela Lansbury's debut in music theatre whose casting alone is worth cherishing this recording, where she coped bravely and astoundingly with the whole bravura, dazzling span of her material, introducing her distinct, bewitching, everlasting performance magic.

A Sondheim/Laurents flop well worth cherishing.