The unsung Sondheim

The London revival of his biggest Broadway flop reveals the troubled man behind the musical mask

Stephen Sondheim is alive and well and living in London. Discard those reference books that describe him as a New Yorker born and bred, mentored by Oscar Hammerstein, the last white hope of the Great White Way.

Distrust those critics who hail him as some kind of General Custer of the stage musical, defender of a doomed art against moronic hordes of Lloyd Webber derivatives.

The truth about Sondheim is that he is a prophet with very little honour in his own land. Most of his musicals bombed on Broadway, before wowing the West End. Several reached the National Theatre (A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George), one was sung by English National Opera (Pacific Overtures) and most can be seen up and down the land in church halls, college refectories and summer festivals. In English hands, Sondheim is safe - almost foolproof.

For America, though, his harmonies are a shade too sophisticated, his wit too introspective, his metaphors too clever by half. Those who go to a musical in expectation of a boy-girl plot and a hummable show-stopper feel cheated by Sondheim. At 72, he belongs less to the comfort line of Rodgers and Hammerstein than to the laconic selflacerations of Noël Coward and Frederick Ashton. He writes, somehow, in an English accent. I have never met him, but I'm sure he'd say tom-ah-to, not tom-ay-to.

Our adoption of Sondheim does not denote superior taste. Many in the West End fail to get the point and even cultists admit that his work has lapses and must be taken whole, or not at all. Their nerve will be tested tonight with the off-West End return of his greatest flop.

Anyone Can Whistle opened on Broadway on 4 April, 1964, and closed after nine performances. Although its theme tune became a popular torch song, the show was apparently never staged again - until now. Recast in concert form for a 1994 Aids gala, it was critically hooted as callow juvenilia.

Yet, and it's a big yet, this was Sondheim's first attempt at a fullblooded musical. It is seductively scored and rich in the moral complexities that he seditiously introduced to the genre. Its failure remains a theatrical perplexity.

So I rang Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book and directed the original Broadway show. Laurents is a man of extreme candour who calls himself "Steve's best friend". They first teamed up on West Side Story (music by Bernstein; book, Laurents; lyrics, Sondheim) and went on to cowrite Gypsy and Do I Hear a Waltz? Laurents, 86, has given Anyone Can Whistle a 21st century makeover, cutting it to two acts and furnishing it with laptops and mobile phones.

"Why did it crash?" he wonders. "Most of the fault was mine. I was both writer and director: I needed someone to tell me that you go blind if you do both. Then there was my casting: Angela Lansbury was wonderful, the other two couldn't sing."

That judgment is too subjective. On the original 1964 cast recording, Lansbury vamps and Harry Guardino emits a toneless growl, but Lee Remick as Nurse Apple renders the title song with a tender twist. "She was going out with Steve at the time," explains Sondheim's biographer Meryle Secrest. "He was tremendously taken with her."

Anyone Can Whistle is about a dying town whose decadent mayor invents a water-spouting rock to attract religious tourism. The town's only other amenity is a mental home, the Cookie Jar. When the cookies mingle with the miracle pilgrims, no one can tell them apart. The head nurse, its heroine, is an emotional wreck - able to relate only when tarted up in suspenders and speaking French.