Anyone Can Whistle

Anyone Can Whistle is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Arthur Laurents. It is an imaginative fable about a town going through hard times due to having "manufactured a product that never wore out", according to its narrator. The mayoress, Cora Hoover Hooper (Angela Lansbury in the original production), and the town council, Comptroller Schub, Treasurer Cooley, and Police Chief MacGruder hatch a scheme to provide the town with a "miracle" consisting of water pouring from a rock, in the hopes that it will bring tourists to the town and revive its failing economy. However, they are opposed by Fay Apple (Lee Remick), a nurse at the local sanitarium, The Cookie Jar, who brings her 49 patients (or "cookies") to the miracle hoping to prove that it is a fake (which it is.) Eventually, her "cookies" escape, leaving the town council to determine "which is what and who is who." Suddenly a new doctor (or so he claims), J. Bowden Hapgood (Harry Guardino), appears on the scene, who divides the town into "Group A" and "Group 1" claiming one group is sane and the other loony... but refusing to tell which group is what. However, nothing in the town is what it seems. As expected, hilarity ensues.

External links

• Internet Broadway Database listing