GRAMOPHONE Review: Sondheim – Anyone Can Whistle (Studio Cast Recording): Maria Friedman, Julia McKenzie, National Symphony Orchestra/Edwards

I smell a collector’s item. This cracking recording of Stephen’s Sondheim’s second Broadway show as composer/lyricist, Anyone Can Whistle – complete down to every last dance break and entrance and exit cues – was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in 1997 and is only now being released. Why? I guess it was waiting in the wings for the Trump presidency; waiting for the moment to be just right for its second (or first in the case of this recording) coming. You see Anyone Can Whistle with a book by Arthur ‘West Side Story’ Laurents (who pops up here as narrator in his own book) bombed spectacularly on its Broadway outing back in 1964. Not even the young Angela Lansbury (who claimed it would have permanently wrecked her voice should it had lasted more than 12 previews and 9 performances) and Lee Remick could salvage this wild and wacky and decidedly un-PC satire on civic greed and exploitation. It was quite simply out of step with 1964 sensibilities.

But in the age of Fleabag where absolutely nothing is sacred and politics know no shame all bets are off. Anyone Can Whistle is like a microcosm of Trump’s America – a morally and financially bankrupt small town whose corrupt mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper will stop at nothing to win favour with a disenchanted populace. Fake news? She invented it. Oh, and there’s an asylum called The Cookie Jar where free-thinkers are conveniently segregated – until they’re not and you can’t tell the ‘lunatics’ from the, well, ‘lunatics’.

Laurents’ book is all spitfiring one-liners and madcap farce – and who knows if it could ever be successfully revived, even now. But Sondheim’s score has its fair share of marvels (indeed one or two of his finest songs, period) and boy does this performance sell it for all it’s worth. Don Walker’s brassy, fiercely exciting orchestrations sound suitably rampant under John Owen Edwards racy direction and the two starring female roles field two of our most venerated leading ladies.

Julia McKenzie wields her trumpet-toned belt brashly and audaciously as Cora. It’s her show, her parade, and nobody’s going to rain on it, least of all Fay Apple, The Cookie Jar’s resident ‘nurse’ and the show’s voice of reason and idealism. Maria Friedman is she, bringing her scene-stealing intelligence to bear on marvellous numbers like ‘There Won’t Be Trumpets’ (Friedman is on fire in that) and, of course, the title song. Her quiet confidential artistry in that – perhaps my favourite Sondheim song of all – is intensely moving.

I once asked Lansbury what her favourite Sondheim song was – and she unhesitatingly chose ‘With So Little To Be Sure Of’, the climactic duet of this score. Just so. Greatness descended on Sondheim with that number at a point where nothing less would do.