High aim is always commendable in the theater, and there can be no doubt of the lofty and praiseworthy ambition of "Anyone Can Whistle." But some actual fulfillment must accompany the dream, and it seemed to me that the new musical comedy by Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim … was so ponderously heavy-handed and clumsily vague in its presentation of a somewhat obscure thesis that it could bring the entire idea of good intentions under suspicion….

Mr. Laurents, who wrote the book and staged the production, seems to have had in mind a serious moral parable in terms of comic fantasy….

As a story, it is meandering, devious and not very enlivening in its humor. But this is presumably beyond the point, since it is all apparently meant to be an allegory. Mr. Laurents tells us that the mentally ill can't be distinguished from the gullible pilgrims to the...