Anyone Can Whistle, Bridewell Theatre, London

Thinking man's Sondheim

Just after the September 11 attacks, a scheduled Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins bit the dust, cancelled on the grounds that it was "not an appropriate time" to invite the public "to think critically about various aspects of the American experience". Since then, there's been a hardening of this attitude that believes it is never an appropriate time to think critically – that even to question is to an un-American activity. So there's a salutary timeliness to this revival of Anyone Can Whistle, Sondheim's 1964 musical satire on conformist mentality and government corruption.

It's set in a town going bust because it makes a product that never wears out. The mayoress (Paula Wilcox) and her henchmen fabricate a phoney miracle – water flowing from a rock – to drum up religious tourism. When sceptical Nurse Apple (Janie Dee) arrives with her charges from the local mental institution "for the socially pressured", they get mixed up with the pilgrims and no one can tell the difference. Which is not good news for the economic miracle.

The liberals who dare to resist the forces of draconianconventionality are a decidedly odd couple. Nurse Apple has a history of sexual frigidity – she can only let go when she's in her tarty, wig-and-fishnets disguise as "ze lady from Lourdes" come to test this rival phenomenon. And the new young doctor, Hapgood (Edward Baker-Duly), with whom she falls in love, is a case of mis- taken identity – he should be an asylum inmate. As the gullible pilgrims rush off to the next town, now marketing its own miracle, the nurse summons up her first whistle and the lovers unite.

Michael Gieleta's game but patchy revival does not establish Whistle as the neglected masterwork it is sometimes claimed to be by Sondheim buffs. It's defiantly a concept musical, rather than one that derives from character, and it is occasionally fascinating to hear Sondheim experiment with techniques – such as portraying a typical mind-set through musical pastiche – that would bear tangier fruit in shows like Assassins and Follies.

There's a terrific sequence (which is ironically called "Simple") where the new doctor is told to segregate the mad and the sane and he parodies the twisted thinking behind the vicious them-and-us mentality with a bamboozling logic: "The opposite of left is right/ The opposite of right is wrong/ So anything that's left is wrong, right?" President Bush would doubtless fail to see the flaws in that particular argument.

I happen to think that Sondheim's Sweeney Todd is the greatest piece of post-1945 musical theatre. None the less, I have to look away when it accuses us all of being Sweeneys. It's the same here when the audience cast take flash photographs of the audience as though we are the real maniacs. Oh, please.

Arthur Laurents has rejigged the book; there's modern technology (Nurse Apple's files are on a laptop), though there's still an amazing absence of media attention. But if the emotional aspect still continues to feel a bit under-powered, this is no fault of the sublime Janie Dee, who brings a hilarious guyed-Gallic raunchiness to her number) and an intensely touching simplicity and yearning ardour to the title song. She gives this cerebral show heart.

To 15 Feb (020-7936 3456)