Anyone Can Whistle is set in an imaginary town that has gone bankrupt, it focuses on the tough, unpopular mayoress, Cora Hoover Hooper who, determined to rescue it from financial ruin, together with her political cronies creates a tourist attraction by faking a miracle - curative waters spouting from a rock in the town square. They find themselves challenged by skeptical Fay Apple, a nurse at the local sanitarium, who intends to use her patients to disprove the claim. Onto the scene comes J. Bowden Hapgood, a patient mistaken for a psychiatrist, who divides the town into two groups, the sane and the loony, but refuses to divulge which is which. The story's point is that 'normal' is a euphemism for self-control, conformity, and order, and its moral is that the true miracle simply is being alive.
After multiple revisions, the show opened on Broadway in April 1964, where it closed after nine performances, unable to overcome the generally negative reviews it had received. Although there never has been a major revival of the show, it has become a cult favourite, and a truncated original cast recording sold well among Sondheim fans and musical theater buffs