A Sondheim overhaul

Misty Cotton and John Bisom are doing a little duet.

But the notes they hit while seated side by side on a brown corduroy couch in the attic of the Matrix Theatre have nothing to do with the score they’re immersed in these days as the romantic leads of “Anyone Can Whistle,” Stephen Sondheim’s seldom-staged musical fable from 1964.

“Oh, no!” they shout in unison, Cotton covering her mouth while Bisom’s lanky body convulses in amused horror.

“Oh, my goodness!” cries Cotton.

“Oh, my God!” echoes Bisom.

“That’s horrible!” she pipes.

He ends the impromptu stanza with a cackle: “So this show is doomed from the beginning!”

Then they fall into a chorus of laughter.

What’s set the two young actors off is a new (to them, anyway) piece of the considerable lore, none of it very happy, surrounding “Anyone Can Whistle.” Their director, Michael Michetti, who knows everything about the show, apparently has judiciously kept it from them, but an interviewer has just let it slip. Yes, not only was “Whistle” the biggest Broadway flop of Sondheim’s celebrated career, lasting just nine performances despite boasting Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick as leads, but it left behind a pair of corpses: the supporting actor who died of a heart attack in his hotel room during a shakedown run in Philadelphia, and the pit musician, also in Philly, who had a stroke after a dancer toppled from the stage and landed on him.

Bisom recovers enough to make a verbal sign of the cross: “I can’t think of that as laying the groundwork for our production.”

Indeed, Michetti has done some heavy spadework of his own in hopes that the production that he and producer Carole Black are mounting at the 99-seat Matrix will avert the fate of the nearly stillborn version of 1964.

Last summer, he studied the script closely, read the original reviews and absorbed the subsequent commentaries in books and articles about Sondheim. He digested the postmortem reflections of Sondheim and of Arthur Laurents, who wrote the story and dialogue and directed the original show. Michetti even went on EBay to acquire old Playbills so he could study how the songs’ running order changed as “Whistle” slogged from out-of-town previews toward its short, unhappy life on Broadway.

The result of all that perusal is a new, revised version of “Whistle.” It streamlines the musical from three acts to two, excises one dance sequence, and blends two crowd processions into one. It seeks to tighten the aim of Laurents’ scattershot social satire and tries to clearly establish Nurse Fay Apple, the emotionally constricted do-gooder of the piece, as the protagonist (the part was originally played by Remick and now by Cotton). Lansbury’s character, Cora Hoover Hooper (played at the Matrix by Broadway veteran Ruth Williamson), becomes a colorful second-banana, the diva-like scalawag of a mayor who runs the tale’s unnamed town with her troika of corrupt henchmen.

Focusing on love story

So what ailed the original “Anyone Can Whistle”?

Most of the critics 39 years ago liked the music and applauded the show’s inventive, groundbreaking production numbers. Several songs survived the fiasco to enter the Sondheim canon, including “Anyone Can Whistle”; “Everybody Says Don’t”; “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” which inexplicably got cut from the Broadway run but was resurrected for the show’s CD; and the concluding love duet, “With So Little to Be Sure Of.” But reviewers flayed the show for never making clear what it wanted to be about.

Was it a satire on political corruption and the bevy of other topical concerns raised in Laurents’ script? A knock on religious gullibility, as Cora and her crew invent a Lourdes-like miracle to prime the pump on their town’s collapsed economy? A disquisition on the sanity of those whom society deems crazy and the madness of those purportedly playing with a full deck?

Or is “Anyone Can Whistle” above all a love story in which the rational and repressed Fay learns, at the very end, to let down her guard and whistle her heart’s affection? The object of which is Bisom’s character, J. Bowden Hapgood, a Quixotic quester who makes scrambled eggs of Cora’s miracle caper while embodying the embattled spirit of individualism.

Michetti and Black, a retired high-tech trade magazine publisher who is anteing up the show’s $130,000 budget herself, chose the love story as the main focus of their revival. But they needed the creators’ OK for their proposed changes. Sondheim said the revisions were fine by him -- his songs all made it in intact, albeit in somewhat different running order -- but check with Laurents. Laurents, the L.A. team says, not only approved Michetti’s revisions but supplied a few pages of additional ones along the same lines.

(Sondheim declined to be interviewed for this story, and Laurents was traveling in Europe and could not be reached.)

So can this production -- the only previous professional staging in L.A. was in 1986 at another small theater, the Dupree Studio -- turn “Anyone Can Whistle” from a white elephant into an unearthed treasure?

Cursed or cured?

Paul Salsini, editor of the Sondheim Review, a quarterly magazine for the composer-lyricist’s devotees, isn’t buying it.

“ ‘Anyone Can Whistle’ just got such a bad karma about it, I think it’s hard to eliminate,” he says. “I can’t imagine this version will have much of a future beyond L.A.”

Success for this “Whistle” would contradict Sondheim’s own prediction, quoted in Craig Zadan’s 1974 biography, “Sondheim & Co.,” that “the show would not hold up to revival because so much has happened in the last 10 years that ‘Whistle’ would seem hilariously old-fashioned.” Sondheim also told Zadan that the story was too scattered and garbled and the satire saddled with elements that were “rather condescending ... a nastiness toward the audience that was not intended.”

A more current sour note was whistled just last month, in piercing unison, by the British press, which roundly berated a London production of more or less the same revision Michetti and Black are presenting here.

“It is as confusing as it is boring.... I comprehended little and cared less,” wrote Benedict Nightingale in the Times of London.

“Even the vaunted changes to the story amount largely to an acknowledgment that we now live in a world of laptops and cell phones,” the Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote in his more circumspect but nevertheless unimpressed review.

There won’t be laptops at the Matrix.

Michetti, who fell for Sondheim 30 years ago as a San Diego County teenager taking in “A Little Night Music” on his first trip to New York, is directing his fifth Sondheim show in a little more than three years. He is leaving “Anyone Can Whistle” in its original, early-’60s era -- pre-hippies, pre-antiwar protests, pre-laptops and cell phones -- the better to burnish it as a fable.

There won’t be collisions, either -- a distinct hazard when packing a big musical onto a tiny stage. At least that’s the promise of choreographer Larry Sousa, even though “Whistle” has several production numbers that require most or all of the 18 cast members to saunter on parade or scurry about during a waltz-tempo chase sequence.

After teaching a 12-member chorus how to prance with joy over the miraculous fountain that springs from a rock in the town square, the compact, boyish-looking Sousa took a break during a recent rehearsal and acknowledged that those are a lot of dancing bodies to contain in such a small area.

“Luckily, we’ve had no real injuries. The collisions are always really funny, and these actors are so good, they [act] as if they’re supposed to happen and we all laugh.” Sousa vows perfection by opening night. “We’re knocking off the collisions one by one.”

Any miscues will be apparent in this matchbox of a house, which is usually occupied by Joseph Stern’s highly regarded company of Hollywood actors who use it as a refuge, where they can take a break from episodic television and do plays by Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter.

The theater, which producer Black is renting for a “Whistle” run of up to 80 performances, has just three rows of seating in the middle and five rows on the wings.

Whatever risks the acting ensemble is taking, it’s doing it for love, not money. “Whistle” is being staged under the Actors’ Equity 99-seat theater plan, in which pros play for a pittance -- $7 to $15 a night, depending on the length of the run -- in exchange for the chance for exposure and artistic satisfaction.

“It’s very exciting to try to make something that didn’t work before work now,” says Williamson, a recent transplant to L.A. after 26 years playing on New York stages. “It was so wildly iconoclastic when it was first produced, but I think an audience today would be much more willing to accept the madness of it and go with the flow.”

Black admits she has visions of succeeding in L.A., finding other investors and mounting a production at a 250-seat off-Broadway theater. Michetti isn’t permitting himself any daydreams about being hailed the hero for giving a famed flop a fabulous rebirth.

“Until it’s on its feet, we won’t know whether my ideas will work or not,” he says. “The first step is to make this work, and if I can be part of making a show that’s not been viable more viable, it would be a great honor.”

As for Bisom, the sideburned, wavy-haired leading man, he’s heard enough “Whistle” lore from long ago and would prefer to just get on with the show.

Oh, by the way, did he know that Harry Guardino, the original Hapgood, lost his singing voice and had to talk his way through performances?

“Don’t tell me that!” Bisom commands without losing his smile. “I’m just getting over tonsillitis. So no, no, no, I don’t need to hear that!”

*

‘Anyone Can Whistle’

Where: Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles

When: Opens Friday, 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m.

Ends: May 11

Price: $33-$38

Contact: (323) 852-1445