ANYONE CAN WHISTLE
Sondheim attributes the Broadway failure of Anyone Can Whistle to a lack of creative “abrasion,” i.e., to collaborators not willing to challenge Laurents and Sondheim on their choices. Victoria Bussert, director of Pegasus Players’ current revival of the work, believes that the original show was hampered by bad design. I think they’re both right. The musical’s three acts of political satire cum goofy love story don’t quite add up; there are times when the intentional illogic of the script and score becomes frustratingly incomprehensible. But as Bussert’s staging of Anyone Can Whistle proves, insightful direction and design can emphasize the work’s virtues with such intensity that the mistakes don’t matter.
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I first met Michael Rasfeld in 1971, when he was running sound and lights for the Godzilla Rainbow Troupe at the old Kingston Mines Theater. Inspired by Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York, Godzilla was pursuing a pansexual, crazy-quilt, magic-minded, fantasy-based style of theater, with one foot in the classics and the other kicking down the doors of tradition as hard and as humorously as possible. It was a launching pad for several of Chicago’s most distinctive talents, including the actor J. Pat Miller, whose death from AIDS I wrote about in this newspaper four years ago.
