Reviving Sondheim’s ‘Whistle’ With an Eye on the Moment

The legendary composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was not long past his wunderkind days when in 1964 he unveiled the musical “Anyone Can Whistle” featuring a book by Arthur Laurents, his collaborator on “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” and starring in their first musical roles on Broadway the noted stage and screen actors Angela Lansbury, Harry Guardino, and Lee Remick. Sounds like a sure winner, but the production closed after nine performances and has not returned to Broadway since.Time at least has been kind to the score, which includes such rousing and piercing gems as the show’s title tune, “Everybody Says Don’t,” “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” and “With So Little to Be Sure Of.” These songs have endured through recordings, cabaret performances, and concert stagings like the one planned for Carnegie Hall on March 10, as part of MasterVoices current season.The one-night-only event will mark the second time that “Whistle” arrives at the venue: The musical was presented in concert there in 1995, with Madeleine Kahn, Bernadette Peters, and Scott Bakula playing the leads — respectively, a corrupt mayor, an idealistic nurse, and an unconventional psychiatrist. The new staging features Vanessa Williams, Elizabeth Stanley, and Santino Fontana in the roles. Joanna Gleason will narrate, as Dame Lansbury did in 1995.Ted Sperling, the artistic director of MasterVoices, selected “Whistle” in part for its topicality. “I’m finding myself more and more wanting to program work that speaks to our particular moment,” he says, adding that the work “was written at a time when culture wars were raging … and the country was really struggling with changing societal norms and the challenging of the status quo. This show put that front and center. I think some of its text must have been pretty shocking back then.”Ms. Stanley, who like Mr. Fontana made her Broadway debut in a revival of a Sondheim musical, admits, “The book is hard,” even in this abridged edition. “We’ve been analyzing it a lot, and it’s highly stylized, absurdist theater.”Mr. Sperling is essentially using the same script that was employed in the last Carnegie Hall concert, with a few tweaks. Before Sondheim’s death last November, the composer had counseled him: “Steve and I had a long history, and he instantly gave me permission. When you do a concert you always want to put the emphasis on the music, so the script can get cut, and that can be upsetting to the scriptwriter — or in this case, his estate.” (Laurents died in 2011.)“So Steve said, ‘Listen, why don’t you just make it easy for yourself, and use one of the scripts that was used during Arthur’s lifetime, that he himself approved?’” Mr. Fontana, a Tony Award winner for his last Broadway outing, in the musical “Tootsie,” has been “obsessed” with “Whistle” since performing in a high school production. He later directed college students in a staging, and still finds “a lot to investigate” in the show. He points to the ironically titled “Simple,” a 15-minute number “about the labels we put on people, the stereotypes of what a man should be and what a woman should be. It’s not that different now than it was then.”Ms. Stanley sees her character as a “woman of the ’60s. The sexual revolution brought this great shift, where women were supposed to have all this freedom. [She] is very organized and professional, but she also wants to cut loose and be free … but she can’t unless she puts on this costume, with a red wig and a red dress. I can imagine that a lot of women of that time felt that dichotomy.”For Mr. Fontana, the show is “beautiful and neurotic and human. It’s about people who just want connection in their lives. And let’s face it: Sondheim just passed away, and he was the best writer for musical theater we’ve ever had. So this is very special.”

Reviving Sondheim’s ‘Whistle’ With an Eye on the Moment

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