The London revival of the musical Anyone Can Whistle, the largest staged version of the show since its 1964 Broadway debut, has received mixed reviews from theater critics. The creative team includes Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (music, lyrics), Georgie Rankcom (direction), Natalie Pound (musical direction), Lisa Stevens (chorerography), Don Walker (orchestrations), Charlie Ingles (new orchestrations), Cory Shipp (sets, costumes), and Alex Musgrave (lights). The cast includes Alex Young (Cora), Chrystine Symone (Fay), Jordan Broatch (Hapgood), Danny Lane (Schub), Samuel Clifford (Cooley), Renan Teodoro (Magrueder), Nathan Taylor (Dr Detmold), Kathryn Akin (Mrs Schroeder), Marisha Morgan (Baby Joan), Teddy Hinde (John), Hana Ichijo (June), Shane Convery (George), and Jensen Tudtud (Martin). The production ends its limited engagement at Southwark Playhouse on May 7.
Evening Standard (Nick Curtis): Rankcom’s oafish production, packed with pratfalls, mugging and forced hysteria, makes the show’s relative neglect over the decades seem entirely justified. … Rankcom has recruited a partly gender-fluid cast to buttress the idea that this is a satire on conformity, but otherwise compounds the show’s faults. … A shame because Chrystine Symone, as Fay, has a fine voice, and Alex Young as Cora clearly has good pipes too as well as comic flair. But they are given insufficient direction, flailing for attention in a sea of crassness. … Rankcom’s production will please bereaved Sondheim completists. Anyone more discerning should give it a body-swerve. 1 out of 5 stars.
Everything Theatre (Lucy Vail): Rankcom has done a wonderful job of blending and embracing the show’s absurdity with its commentary on society and the role of individuality. … Young here shines as Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper and her performance carries the entire show … with stunning vocals and perfect comic timing. She has the audience wrapped around her little finger. … I admit, even having watched the show I am still slightly confused by its entire plot line. But it is two hours of complete escapism and fun. Never have I seen such a bonkers show, and one where although not everything was understandable, I couldn’t help but smile! 4 out of 5 stars.
Guardian (Mark Lawson): The plot is absurd both as a theatrical genre and pejoratively, although with some serious intent. … The songs are most interesting for tryouts of rhyming and rhythm that Sondheim will later perfect. “Simple,” a 13-minute sequence of song, dialogue and action featuring a dozen performers, anticipates mature bravura montages. … Rankcom’s production brilliantly gives the show new contexts. … Most transformationally, a local “lunatic asylum” (in the vernacular of then) becomes, through a young cast, four of whom identify in the programme as non-binary, explicitly a place where society confines those who won’t conform. 4 stars out of 5.
London Theatre (Mariana Swain): Cora is the gleefully corrupt mayoress who reigns over an economically depressed small town. … Her plot strand is the clearest tonally: it’s vaudevillian slapstick backed by a pastiche score. … The other half of the musical is much harder to get a handle on. It features do-gooder nurse Fay Apple. … There’s a resonant point somewhere in here about how we mistreat “others” in society, whether that’s artists who think differently or those who don’t fit our existing norms. But, ironically, the show is so strenuously unconventional that all meaning is lost. A fun attempt, but this is one for the Sondheim completists. 3 out of 5 stars.
London Theatre 1 (Chris Omaweng): There are those who very much enjoyed it, and those who very much didn’t. The style of humour, dependent on one’s disposition, allows audiences to indulge in escapism, or otherwise is infantile to the point of being insufferable. … There are no weak links to report in the cast … even if the plot is sometimes unclear, a subliminal message that there is far more that people have in common than what separates us provides a poignant touch. For the most part, though, this is a production that revels in its own ludicrousness, providing much pleasure to those who find merit in the madness. 4 out of 5 stars.
Times (Donald Hutera): The rarity factor is practically off the scale when it comes to this cartoonishly bright, buoyant revival of Stephen Sondheim’s early cult flop. It has been staged with emphatic flair by Georgie Rankcom. … Materialising on Broadway in 1964 before audiences in thrall to shows such as Hello, Dolly! and Oliver!, Sondheim’s audaciously “fanciful” (his word) musical-comedy closed after nine performances. Was the failure justified? It is more than a mite understandable. Sondheim’s score is memorable — witty, sometimes touching and melodious, but robust; Arthur Laurents’s ambitious book, however, is far trickier. 3 out of 5 stars.
WhatsOnStage (Alun Hood): Rankcom has set this new production in a non-period-specific, candy-coloured fantasy land … and cast a joyously diverse ensemble. … It’s refreshing to see such a company of triple threat genuine talents who are so fabulously themselves. … Sondheim and Laurents’s bizarre confection isn’t in whistling distance of being a great musical, but it is … worth going along to hear these magnificent numbers performed live, and to witness the glorious Young take scenery-chewing and grabbing flailing material by the scruff of its neck, to new heights of dizzying delight. 3 out of 5 stars.