Well, dear readers, the hills are occasionally alive and well in the new tour of The Sound of Music. I don’t rush to see anything these days and when I do go I’m not expecting much. But I had an interest in this, since the director is Jack O’Brien and I was curious to see what spoke to him in this piece. I was also happy to see they actually cast a young person as Maria. I had a great fourth row seat and as I entered the theater I was so happy to see a front curtain. It became unfashionable for any shows to ever have a front curtain and whoever is responsible for it is an idiot. Yes, when Gower Champion didn’t have one for Carnival it was unique – same with Stop the World – I Want to Get Off. But there is something magical about a classic front curtain revealing the magic that awaits behind it. But I cannot recall a show in the last twenty years that had one – not a musical and not a straight play. So, if that was Jack O’Brien’s idea, my hat is off to him. Here is actual photographic proof of the front curtain.
Obviously what follows are my own personal thoughts. I am not now nor have I ever been a critic. I’m just a guy who sees things and has opinions, just like everyone else, and I share them as I always do with you dear readers. I’d seen an interview with Mr. O’Brien in which he basically said that what he wanted to bring out in the piece was the sex and politics. Well, I’m not sure what was in his head about the “sex” but, c’mon, it’s The Sound of Music not The First Nudie Musical. I understand the politics, but, you know, that’s in the text, it’s there, and it wasn’t like the film didn’t play it up, because it did, and much more strongly than the play. But to act like that’s something you’re bringing to the table for the first time is a little disingenuous. He wanted Sixteen Going on Seventeen to be sexy. Well, I don’t know about sexy, but in the film it’s certainly suffused with innocence and first romance and it’s done beautifully. Mr. O’Brien’s big thing to bring to that number is having Maria see the beginning of it – who cares? What does that have to do with anything, since it’s not in the text? It’s a completely weird moment and it completely takes away from Liesl and Rolf, who are the characters the number is actually about. He clearly wanted someone sexy as Rolf, but I think that has more to do with Mr. O’Brien than The Sound of Music. Rolf is cute, looks about twenty-five (the Liesl doesn’t look sixteen either – have no idea how old either of them are), and the number kind of lands with a thud because there’s no joy in it or fun, really.
Then there’s Max Detweiller and Elsa Schraeder, who provide much of the comic relief in the show, even though their characters aren’t really comic. Max is wry and has some great lines, and Elsa is arch and has some great lines. But when the actors spend all their time playing AT the wry and arch it doesn’t work. Whether they’ve been instructed to play it like that (there’s a lot of playing subtext rather than text – it doesn’t work in this show – at all) I know not, but other than a mild chuckle or two, neither character really comes off in this production.
I think Mr. O’Brien was also afraid of ever having the kids too cutesy, so he’s gone the opposite way and it’s the first production of this show I’ve seen where the kids aren’t that much fun and have very low energy. Mr. O’Brien’s want or need to accentuate the politics also isn’t much of anything – Ernest Lehman fixed a lot of the stage version problems in the film – in fact, his work on the film is genius and it improves on the show in every possible way. I am grateful, however, to Mr. O’Brien for doing the SHOW and not some hybrid version. The only show song MIA is An Ordinary Couple, which has been replaced by the equally bland Something Good from the film. The butler doesn’t register much at all, and the maid is kind of like Andrea Martin. The nuns are all fine and sing very well, and the other supporting players are fine, too.
Which, of course, leads us to Captain Von Trapp and Maria. The Von Trapp is okay – the audience seemed to like him but I found him low energy and underplaying too much – again, that may be a directorial choice, but the show needs all the energy it can get, and I certainly don’t mean over-the-top or hammy. It gets better in the second half, Von Trapp-wise. The Maria is fresh out of college. I liked her – she sings well and has some spunk, but there’s no real star quality there and she never really takes over and commands the stage. That’s sort of okay for Maria, but maybe not for a production of The Sound of Music. I think she’s got more in her than she’s being allowed to deliver, but that’s just a guess on my part.
The choreography, such as it is, is just a lot of busy moving around – most of the time it’s fine, and sometimes it’s just busy to be busy. It’s lovely that they use the superb Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations, but the orchestra size is a little anemic at sixteen. It sounds good, though. Sound design is okay – with the usual pumping it up to get applause – so Climb Ev’ry Mountain gets louder and louder, mic-wise. Ashley Brown is the Mother Abbess. She was the original Broadway Mary Poppins and she’s very good here and sings wonderfully and her Climb Ev’ry Mountain is just terrific. But when the Mother Abbess gets the biggest ovation at the curtain call, something is wrong somewhere. The first act ran just under ninety minutes and the second seemed to run just over an hour. The second act of the show is fascinating as there are only, I think, three new songs in it, the rest being reprises. The opening of the show is Rodgers and Hammerstein just going their own damn way, as they always did with show openings. They’re never what you would expect and the ASCAP/BMI pundits would be hard pressed to ever explain how they work. In this case, the show begins sans overture, with the nuns singing for a rather long time. Then we finally go to the hill for the title song – unusual to have the first real song in the show be a ballad, but when it’s as musically beautiful as The Sound of Music, it works perfectly. It also sets up Maria and the show really well.
All that said, this is the first stop on the tour (they teched the show out of town, then came directly here) – so they’re really still in previews. The show moves very smoothly – I really liked the sets a lot, the lighting less so. I never understand why a lighting designer lights a scene and then has spotlights on the actors in it so that they’re brighter – why not just light the damn scene and leave it at that? The costumes are nice, too. Mr. O’Brien, late in his career, became the builder of efficient machines, musicals-wise, with The Full Monty and Hairspray. The Sound of Music feels less like those shows and more in the classic mode, which is a good thing. I’m sure it will get better and everyone will settle in to their roles. I REALLY wanted to love it, that’s all I can tell you. I liked it – it had a handful of moments that I found moving, and a couple of moments that I found original and interesting. The audience was quiet, respectful, the applause, save for Climb Ev’ry Mountain, was not huge, but they were hooting and hollering at the curtain call and were on their feet the second Ashley Brown came out. There was one moment I found a little off-putting in terms of the audience – when Von Trapp and Maria kiss, there were adults in the audience who reacted as if they were in grammar school. I don’t know what’s with people today. I also found the cell phone announcement delivered by an admonishing Mother Abbess (pre-recorded, of course) to be hugely unfunny. I was happy to see it and happy they were mostly true to the original writing.
Prior to that, I’d gotten around five hours of sleep, fixed CDs were delivered, and then I went back to bed and got another two hours of sleep. Once up, I did some work on the computer, had some telephonic calls, took a walk and did some banking and then got ready to mosey on over to the Ahmanson. The first part of the drive was amazingly fast – it only took eight minutes from my house almost all the way to where LACC is. Once you hit that area, however, it took an additional thirty minutes to go five miles. But I got to the theater about 5:50, got a great parking space in their parking garage and then went upstairs and ate at the outdoor restaurant called Pinot. Now, understand that I have never had a good meal at this jernt, but you can’t get into the downstairs restaurant without reserving days in advance, and I didn’t feel like eating packaged sandwiches or salads from their little convenience store.
I got a nice table and ordered a Caesar salad (just okay) and salmon (weird, sitting on some kind of something that was baffling and really bad tasting. The salmon itself was fine but had some weird green stuff on top. But I sat, ate slowly and relaxed until it was time to go into the theater. The other thing the Ahmanson does right is open the house at half-hour. I loathe and detest this “new” way of not opening the house until fifteen minutes – it’s sickening. After the show, I happily got out of the parking garage really fast and home in about twelve minutes.
Today, I have to write all of the commentary, and then I’ll eat, hopefully pick up packages, then relax.
Tomorrow, we have an added performance and I hope to heaven we have a decent house. People do tend not to get their tickets until the last second, a truly annoying and irritating habit of LA people. Then we have our Friday, Saturday performances, and we close with our Sunday matinee. We’re trying to decide if we’re going to store the set or not – I can put it in my garage or in my storage facility if we decide to. That would give us the ability to bring it back early next year for a week or two right before pilot season starts, so that Sami would be visible. We’ll see.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, write a commentary, eat, hopefully pick up packages, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s Ask BK Day, the day in which you get to ask me or any dear reader any old question you like and we get to give any old answer we like. So, let’s have loads of lovely questions and loads of lovely answers and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to know the hills are occasionally alive with the sound of music.