In “Anyone Can Whis tle,” Donna Murphy embodies everything that’s exhilarating about musical theater. When she’s onstage, it’s pure, unadulterated ecstasy — there isn’t a more dynamite performance anywhere else in town.
The rest of this Encores! production of Stephen Sondheim’s cult flop is right in step, thanks to Murphy’s co-stars, Sutton Foster and Raul Esparza, and the breakneck-speed direction and choreography of Casey Nicholaw.
It’s no surprise the 1964 show closed a week after opening: The score makes you bob your head, the plot makes you scratch it. Arthur Laurents described his book as “very strange and zany” at the time. That’s an understatement.
Yet at City Center, where the show runs until tomorrow, it’s easy to just revel in the joyous insanity of it all.
The absurdist story looks at how sanity is both hard to define and overrated, but it also examines opportunistic politicians who pull fast tricks on gullible citizens. Murphy is Cora Hoover Hooper, the “mayoress” of a derelict town who decides to fabricate a miraculous spring to draw in credulous pilgrims.
Sporting a platinum bouffant and fabulous ’60s-style outfits, Murphy’s Cora is a pandering politician who’s both seductive and steely — and always on. She slinks, purrs, growls, shakes her tail feathers and generally whips herself into a frenzy.
Her first big number, “Me and My Town,” is perhaps too close to Murphy’s “Conga” in “Wonderful Town,” all flailing knees and elbows. After that, the character jets off into its own demented orbit.
But dementia is par for the course in a show jumping haphazardly from scene to scene (at one point Cora declares “We need a new plotline”) and where mental patients are referred to as “Cookies.”
Most of that story line falls to Foster and the surprisingly fleet-footed Esparza. They’re spectacular in “With So Little To Be Sure Of,” a heartbreaking duet that foreshadows the Sondheim masterpieces to come.
Amazing, isn’t it, how an apparent trifle has so much of what you could want from a musical?
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com