Theatre
Whistle Down the Wind (Aldwych)
Its life in your hands
Sheridan Morley
Just what is it about the British and musicals? To be more specific, just what is it about London drama critics and Andrew Lloyd Webber? By my reckoning, his Whis- tle Down the Wind has thus far had three or four good reviews and another eight or nine of such breathtaking hostility that you begin to wonder whether quite soon writing a musical in this country will become an offence punishable by a short prison sen- tence, or perhaps just a sizeable fine. Moreover, of the good reviews, at least two had writers who acknowledged a connec- tion: one has a relative employed by the show as a music director, and another is writing a biography of the composer. So, present company excepted, we are now down to about one review that could claim to be wholly disinterested and wholly favourable.
One out of a dozen. Is Whistle Down the Wind really that terrible? No, it's not; it may not be perfect, but it does represent a major attempt by its composer to move for- ward, or at the very least to tackle the age- old complaint that he might be very rich but he still isn't Sondheim. This is a dark, thoughtful, intelligent show about religious obsession; its roots are in an extremely good and successful 1961 novel-into-film by Mary Hayley Bell. For those who believe that all good musicals can be summarised in a single sentence, this one is about a trio of lost children who come upon an escaped killer in a barn and, because he curses `Jesus Christ' upon discovery, mistakenly assume that he is simply giving them his name.
But where, nowadays, do you find kids that dumb? The problem is that you don't, so Lloyd Webber and his quite brilliant lyricist Jim Steinman have gone back to 1959 Louisiana, and a backwoods commu- nity where religion is still to do with snakes, and trains don't even stop at the local sta- tion. So this is not another Bible-belter in the old Webber tradition of Joseph or Superstar; its debts are instead to Elmer Gantry and John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath and maybe even the film Deliver- ance, which dealt with a barking mad, long- inbred community of latterday savages in that same district.
I have now seen Whistle three times in three years; once in a kind of workshop concert (with some of the present cast) at Lloyd Webber's home, once in a lavish but again critically disastrous staging in Wash- ington by Hal Prince, and now in its Lon- don premiere by Gale Edwards, the Australian director who did a wonderful salvage job on another hugely underrated Lloyd Webber score, Aspects of Love. Each time, Whistle has changed radically, and we now, I believe, have it about as good as it will ever get. Yes, there indeed remain some problems; the set is still causing per- formances to be cancelled, and I am less in love than the composer with the idea, also tried in Sunset Boulevard, that you have two levels on a gigantic kind of hinge so that the upper level can fold down into the lower. Not only does this clearly cause mechanical troubles backstage, but it also plays hell with sightlines for rather too many rows of stalls and circle.
Then again, we now have rather too many children; not just the original trio, but a whole army of their friends whose anthems drift dangerously close to Annie or even Oliver. This new concept of kiddie power plays hell with the original idea, especially when they sing choruses about how life will be when they rule the world; with one bound we are back to Harry Sec- ombe and a whole area of ghastly British 1950s musical mistakes, whereas the real tragedy of Whistle as originally conceived is that these children don't rule anything, and are hostages to their parents' ill fortunes.
And yet this still doesn't explain the hos- tility. If you are a playwright in this coun- try, or indeed a young director, the oft-quoted George Devine plea for 'the right to fail' is endlessly invoked; if you are a writer of musicals, you seem to have no right to fail and no right to succeed either. There is a lack of tolerance here which I think will quite soon hurt all of us as the- atre-goers; people will simply stop writing new musicals in this country, because the risks and the costs of failure have become just too great. This is not unrealistic; it happened in America these last 20 years or so (as usual, Sondheim remains the excep- tion who proves the rule) where only recently has a new generation of musical writers arrived to revive the genre.
So, all other issues aside, is Whistle Down the Wind worth your time and ticket money? Emphatically, yes. Unlike such current hits as Grease or Saturday Night Fever, unlike Sunset Boulevard from the same composer, this is not simply an old movie reheated for the stage with most of its source power long gone; it is a genuine development of the original, with a yearn- ing intensity and a lyrical, intense, reflec- tive score which will I believe be recalled when many more immediately acceptable scores have disappeared forever. Above all, it remains a play with songs, and the play has a power of plot and character develop- ment which most of us had long since given up looking for outside the works of the aforementioned Sondheim plus Boublil and Schonberg.
Whistle Down the Wind is largely about growing up, and that is something the com- poser is also now doing, albeit maybe a lit- tle late; it is far and away the most adult of all the Lloyd Webber scores, and for that reason also perhaps the most dangerous and difficult. It does not give its audience an easy ride, it is not a theme-park singa- long for the Disney market; it may well never work on Broadway, but that doesn't make it inferior, or in my view deserving of any of the vast range of insults that have been hurled at it over the last few days. Do me a favour; go to see it and make up your own mind. Nobody except the public ever liked Les Miserables when it first opened, and although we are emphatically not look- ing at a triumph on that scale, we are 15 years later dealing with the same problem, an absolute British critical refusal to give new musicals the same deal that we give new plays.
This is far and away the most ambitious show Lloyd Webber has ever attempted, its two newcomers Marcus Lovett and Lottie Mayor are seriously good in difficult lead- ing roles, and it demands a great audience leap of time and space and faith. When the Wind listens to its own whistle, and stays true to its own dark soul, it is deeply and dramatically moving, and I think it deserves a much better deal than it has thus far had from my colleagues. From now on, it is up to you; the show will live, or very possibly die, by word of mouth and I cannot believe that will be anything like as hostile as the print reaction.
I don't wish to sound like a Webber pub- licist but, if Whistle dies a rapid death at the box office, then I think we may as well give up on the hope that big commercial West End musicals into the millennium could be something more than a rehash Of old Hollywood pop hits.
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