Music by Richard Rogers
Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
Book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
Based on The Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp
Directed by Adam Penford
Choreography by Lizzie Gee
Designer Robert Jones
Chichester Festival Theatre
20 August 2023, 14.30
CAST
(excluding the changing cast of children, two per role)
Gina Beck – Maria
Edward Harrison – Captain von Trapp
Janis Kelly- Mother Abbess
Lauren Conroy- Liesl
William Ilkley- Franz
Penelope Woodman – Frau Schmidt
Emma Williams – Elsa Schraeder
Ako Mitchell- Max Detweiler
Dylan Mason – Rolf Gruber
Lauren Chia – Sister Sophia
Wendy Ferguson – Sister Berthe
Julia J Nagle- Sister Margarita
Hana Ichigo- new postulant / dance captain
Rebekah Lowings – Ursula / nun
Minal Patel – Admiral von Schreiber / guest
Matt Pettifor- Herr Zeller
Tony Stansfield – Baron Elberfield / guest
Annabelle Williams- Baroness Elberfield / guest
+
Nazis / Party guests:
Elliot Baker-Costello
Liam Marcellino
I am wary of The Sound of Music. I trust Chichester 100% on musicals, though I note an unusual THREE matinees in a week which might predict the expected audience.
The original stage musical soundtrack (starring Mary Martin) topped the British LP chart in November 1958, and remained cemented to the #1 spot for weeks. After giving way for a week, it returned in March 1960 for 19 weeks, then had further runs of 5 weeks, 13 weeks, two more of one week, then another six weeks in various runs until the end of 1961. That is, these songs totally dominated my pre-teen and early teen years on the BBC Light Programme. Yes, they’re all ear worms. I admit we once used Climb Ev’ry Mountain in an ELT pantomime too.
They did the film with Julie Andrews and added a couple more songs. That soundtrack did even better. It had 70 weeks at #1 at various points between 1965 and 1968. Then the film version also locked into place on Bournemouth’s largest cinema screen for years, and kept returning every summer after that for the tourists. That was a pain for those who lived here. I enjoyed the folk club rude version of Eidelweiss as ‘Idle Swine.‘ I deeply loathed Vince Hill’s UK #2 hit with Eidelweiss in 1967.
Later, when our kids were young, Karen, more appreciative of the dancing than me, insisted we watch it with them, and I have again since with our grandkids, at least twice. I’m used to it and grudgingly accepted the film’s virtues. Then we went to Salzburg twice, and the Trapp family (i.e. buskers dressed as the Trapp family) were singing it all over the town. They even swamped the Mozart quartets on other street corners.
It’s an unusual musical. If we compare it with Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! the only dancing in Sound of Music is when the characters say there will be dancing, mainly from Maria or the kids, or the party ballroom dancing, or Liesl and Rolf dancing to Sixteen Going on Seventeen (one of the dance showpieces). In other words, there is no point where twenty dancers flood the stage and stun with acrobatic dancing and cartwheels. The story is unashamedly sentimental. It’s also heterosexual. No knowing winks among plaid shirted cowboys. There’s none of the high speed vigour that excites in Oklahoma! or in West Side Story. Yet this competes with West Side Story in popularity. They are the two most popular musicals of all. This afternoon the balconies at the Festival Theatre were full including to the very furthest side seats of the balconies, almost always vacant in an otherwise full house. This may give critics problems in judging it:
Writing about this work can sometimes seem to a critic as pointless a task as reviewing the Alps themselves: it’s essentially indestructible, predominantly beautiful and the many peaks are dazzling.
Fiona Mountford, iNews
(I should note that Fiona Mountford wrote the CFT programme notes) She is quite right though.
The ever-changing set design is so far ahead of what any theatre could have aspired to in the late 50s / early 60s. Chichester is perfecting the art of spreading their semi-circular thrust stage onto the auditorium floor. I had never seen a stairway leading off below stage right at the edge of the stage (between the rocks at 3 o’clock on the picture) . Was it built for this? It was used to effect. The abbey walls melt into a jagged mountain top.
The 14 piece orchestra proves again that really good live music will top any recording. I prefer Gina Beck’s Maria to Julie Andrews (while noting she had the same haircut- a good idea). Maybe it was more natural because it was less Advanced RP, I don’t know. Live is invariably better.
Opera singer Janis Kelly, as Mother Abbess held the sustained notes in Climb Ev’ry Mountain so that my sister, who was with us, declared it was the best live singing she’d ever heard.
Maria is a novice nun, and is unfortunately too fond of singing and dancing (My Favourite Things). Mother Abbess (Janis Kelly) is sympathetic enough to duet with her, but even so, Maria is sent off to be a governess for Captain von Trapp’s seven children. Trapp rules by navy whistles and is a stern, unbending father and a widower. Maria will change all that.
Then the children astonished us – singing, dancing, projection, acting. The director and choreographer have put in tremendous efforts, and had the raw material to make it worthwhile. I’d love to properly credit them, but there are two per role, and it’s hard to work out which ‘team’ we had, because I’m guessing they operate as two teams. That’s hard for the adult actors on a matinee, because I guess there will be a different team for the second show, given the probable rules on children’s time on stage. Maybe not. The photo shows the team that we saw.
Songs came in new light. Sixteen Going on Seventeen was always second division compared to the biggest hits, but here had an athletic dance sequence which brought it into a new focus. Liesl is the ‘oldest child’ and the only adult acting as one of the children (thus her role has a dance captain aspect to). Rolf is the telegram boy.
Von Trapp is considering marriage to a rich woman, Elsa Schraeder. At the party he has thrown, he decides to demonstrate a dance to the children with Maria. However, he finds Maria strangely stirring. Elsa looks on.
Elsa has arrived with Max, a crafty impresario, who hearing and seeing how Maria has the children singing and dancing, decides to exploit them commercially at the Salzburg festival.
An aside: the children’s casting is colour blind. It works seamlessly. You don’t notice. Ako Mitchell is a superb Max, but I don’t think I’d have cast him as a Berlin-connected Nazi sympathizer in 1938. I could have happily cast Maria, the Abbess, the nuns as colour blind, the kids too (we never saw their mum), but the ones we see sympathizing with the Nazis? (Elsa, Max, Rolf) Probably not. All credit to Ako Mitchell for making a daft idea work so well.
The whole story takes place in 1938 around Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria into the Third Reich. Rumbles are being felt. Rolf starts doing Nazi salutes. So does Franz, the butler. Von Trapp is an Austrian patriot, refusing to dance to the Nazi’s tune, and yet they want to recruit him back into their navy in his old WWI role of heroic sea captain. The geography is famously wobbly in the story. You can’t walk over the mountain from Salzburg to Switzerland (you’d end up in Bavaria) and you may wonder how landlocked Austria had a navy not having a coast. Shakespeare was poor on which countries had coasts too, his coast of Bohemia was in the Hapsburg Empire, so there’s Austrian precedent, but Austria (I think) still had access to Adriatic ports in 1914. War clouds are gathering, and Elsa and Max advise Von Trapp to go along with the Nazis. That’s when he decides to break with Elsa and realizes he loves Maria, who has run off back to the nunnery. She comes back on the abbess’ advice (which segues into Climb Ev’ry Mountain to take us to the interval) and the subsequent wedding scene is stunning.
The family need to escape. They latch on to Max’s plan to have them perform at the festival. In that way, the captain can delay his call up to the navy in Bremen by a couple of days. Swastikas descend for the festival. Genuine newsreel footage of the Nazi arrival in Vienna from 1938 is projected above the jagged mountain.
Von Trapp will sing with Maria and the kids. This was one I had forgotten.
Von Trapp plays guitar and sings Eidelweiss as an encore. It is actually a defiant protest song against the Nazi occupation… Bless my homeland forever. It is a powerful moment in the story and even managed to finally eradicate my unhappy memories of Vince Hill crooning his way up the UK chart with the song in 1967. It is also a sign of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s genius. Like so many I had assumed it was an old Austrian folk song. It isn’t. They wrote it. In the same way people assumed Ol’ Man River from Showboat was an old spiritual. No, again they wrote it.
Anyway, as we know they escape. The Abbess sings Climb Ev’ry Mountain. Standing ovation. She also closed the first half with it. That is part of the appeal. Not only do they have the marvellous songs My Favourite Things, Do-Re-Mi, Climb Every Mountain,The Sound of Music, but none of them appear just once. They get sung in different places. Even if you’d seen the musical on its first night in 1959, you’d have come away knowing the main songs.
Looking at ratings I am astonished that anyone could rate this production at less than five stars. That’s the going rate for Chichester’s big summer musicals, and yet again this hits the heights. This has happened before. It’s as if there is some lofty five star production out there in the ether for critics, probably Hamlet or King Lear starring several theatrical knights and dames all in colour and gender blind casting with a couple of them in wheelchairs. Hamlet and Horatio would be a couple. Mere musicals can’t aspire to these dizzy heights, particularly if they are as popular (and populist) as this one.
It’s good, hearty, traditional stuff. Beck is brilliant, Kelly is superb, the kids are awesome. The score is a classic, but the book remains a problem – and is one that, like Maria, has yet to be solved.
Gareth Carr, What’s On Stage
The book remains a problem? Your problem, chum. Not mine! In fact I was surprised at how many memorable and funny lines there are. My tears were jerked. My spirit was lifted by the songs. I loved every minute. We shall try to see it again.
I judge musicals as musicals. I judge farces as farces. Five star without a doubt:
*****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
four star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
Arifa Akbar, Guardian ****
Quentin Letts, Sunday Times ****
Fiona Mountford, iNews ****
The Stage ****
Libby Purves, Theatre Cat *****
three star
Clive Davis, The Times ***
Gareth Carr, What’s On Stage ***
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
ADAM PENFORD (DIRECTOR)
Watership Down, Watermill, 2016
Deathtrap, by Ira Levin, Salisbury 2016
Stepping Out by Richard Harris, Salisbury 2012
GINA BECK
South Pacific, Chichester 2021
EDWARD HARRISON
Henry V- Michael Grandage Season 2013
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