To purchase the Original Broadway Cast Recording of ANYONE CAN WHISTLE, click on the image above.

It’s Double Take December at Musical Cyberspace! Every musical pretty much has something one likes and something one doesn’t in it. This month I’ll be listing one of each for a range of musicals, a different one each day.

Anyone Can Whistle

Something I Like: I really like the fact that Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle and was allowed an original cast recording. The world would be a poorer place without Angela Lansbury’s recording of “Me and My Town”. And of course, the rest of the score is filled with gems too, from the heart-wrenching title tune and the inspiring “Everybody Says Don’t” to the charming “Come Play Wiz Me” and the once cut and now restored “There Won’t Be Trumpets”.

Something I Don’t Like: It seems clear to me that everyone was trying to be so clever with Anyone Can Whistle and all that ‘creativity’
was ultimately at the expense of the show. It also seems apparent to me that there is some pride held by its creators that the show is – to myth – unfixable, when what was really unfixable was Laurents’s hubris and everyone’s attempts to satirise absolutely everything between the rise and fall of the curtain. There’s nothing in Anyone Can Whistle that a good does of focus and self-discipline couldn’t have fixed.

Feel free to share your “double take” on Anyone Can Whistle in the comment box!