Anyone Can Whistle | Southwark Playhouse
© Danny With a Camera
My relationship with her, inside and outside the classroom, turned out to be an incredibly inspiring one; to this day, I think of her as someone whose impact on my life cannot be measured. She was EVERYTHING the stories promised: a wondrously free spirit, an agitator, with an honesty to her that toed the line between refreshing and outraging. At the same time, I found P.A. to have a unique predisposition to listening and to sharing generously - her teaching never stopped when her lessons ended, and my impression of her is irrevocably linked to the concept of learning; she dedicates her life to this radical, caring act of exchange, and believes in the free circulation of ideas, joy, and rage, more than anyone I've ever met.
One of the things that brings us together is our love for musical theatre. It's not surprising she loves a form of unconstricted expression that gives creatives the chance to express complex, conflicting sentiments with each musical partition, each lyric, each movement of the body in the space. Musical theatre is about each singular note, and also about different notes coming together; it's conflicted in nature, shifting constantly from perspective to perspective, from small scales to the bigger picture, from solos to polyphony. The choice of going together to see a piece of musical theatre felt incredibly exciting, and right.
In this adventurous frame of mind, which was slightly enhanced by the alcoholic effect of a Pornstar Martini P.A. offered me with sardonic amusement, I entered the Southwark Playhouse. The first thing I noticed was the narrowness of the space, with the stage set-up similar to a runway. The lively audience sat close together, some of them with drinks in their hand, while volunteer ushers carefully looked around to verify the packed crowd would behave.
I mentally revised my research on the original Anyone Can Whistle (P.A. ADORES Sondheim and I didn't want to make a fool of myself): set in a fictional American town, whose only profitable business is the "Cookie Jar", the local mental asylum, it tells the story of an evil, proudly unethical scheme concocted by the corrupted Mayoress and her henchmen to save their administration. The plan is to create a fake miracle, making the townspeople believe that the stream of water flowing from a rock at the edge of town has curative powers; everyone falls for the trick, except Fay Apple, a nurse at the Cookie Jar, who provocatively brings her patients to queue at the rock, hoping to expose the dishonest government.
In this first part, the joyously wild explosion of colours, coupled with the infectious energy and talent of the performers, was incredible. Alex Young as the Mayoress and Chrystine Symone as Fay Apple provided such an interesting contrast between the charm of delightful viciousness and the power of adamant integrity. The ensemble performance of the patients of the Cookie Jar, filled with irony, passion and confidence, made full use of the space transforming a potential weakness in one of the main strengths of the show; the intimacy and familiarity between the performers and the space was palpable, also thanks to the perfect set and costume design (Cory Shipp) and precise, energy-packed choreography (Lisa Stevens).
At this point, the residents of the Cookie Jar created havoc by joining the townsfolk, until no one (except nurse Fay) can tell apart the clinically sane from the clinically insane. The absurdism of the show reached its peak as the production rather deliciously blurred the boundaries between sane/insane people and, most importantly, sane/insane institutions. If the system that produces the labels we have to wear is broken, does the madness lie in the labelled or rather in the labelees?
When it seemed that things couldn't get more chaotic, my world stopped, as Jordan Broatch made their entrance as Hapgood. Their presence exuded sheer confidence and charisma, forcing the audience to momentarily drop all the rest to just contemplate their magnificent, magnetic performance. Mistaken for an assistant of the doctors at the Cookie Jar, Hapgood muddies the waters even more, dividing the townsfolk into two groups, group 1 and group A, without disclosing any details about their criteria for doing so. Broatch's devilishly charming rendition of Hapgood made the character shine with freshness and sex appeal. This new Hapgood owned the stage, playing the trickster, piling madness on top of madness, and seducing every single member of the town (and of the audience) in the process. They are the perfect missing ingredient for this show to become a masterpiece.
The cohesiveness of this production of Anyone Can Whistle was remarkable, along with the wondrous, full use they made of the stage and the audience setting. I could SEE the meticulous, passionate labour of deconstructing the original source and building it again from scratch. It felt right, and true, and a testament to director Georgie Rankcom's inventiveness and resourcefulness. In this interpretation of Sondheim, everything was motivated, everything clicked immediately and fell into place with marvellous ease. The labour behind it did not rely on one idea, no matter how brilliant; it was a triumph of imagination across the board, able to radically transform the whole play, and immerse the audience in that world smoothly (and cheekily).
I think what made this production so special was the honesty, rawness, and individuality of the creatives on and behind the stage. They were able to cause such a warm, collective response exactly because they were presenting an uncompromised truth - that people, and life in general, are messy, wild, non-normative, absurd, tragic, comic, often wild and so deliciously ironic. All this struck me as a miracle of its own - a real one, this time.
© Greta Rilletti Zaltieri, 2022
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