“The Sound of Music” Live (ITV British Television, 2015; U.S. release by PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was a TV version of The Sound of Music, the last musical ever by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (he died on August 23, 1960, nine months after The Sound of Music opened on Broadway, and on September 1 all the lights on Times Square were turned off for one minute and the lights on London’s East End were dimmed as a memorial). It was the last of the great collaborations between Hammerstein and composer Richard Rodgers, and the last work of this important figure whose 1927 production Show Boat had revolutionized the Broadway musical. Though Hammerstein had been writing for the theatre since 1920, Show Boat marks the real start of his important career, and since Charles and I had watched the 1936 film of Show Boat a few months ago I had a sense of comparing them as the beginning and the end of Hammerstein’s career. The production of The Sound of Music we were watching was originally a live telecast from London by Britain’s Indepdendent Television service (ITV) on December 20, 2015 and featured Kara Tointon as Maria von Trapp (nèe Reimer) and Julian Ovendon as Captain Georg von Trapp, who hires her from the Naumberg Abbey convent to be governess to his seven children. Just about everyone over a certain age knows the story: Maria shows up and notices the severe discipline von Trapp has imposed on his kids ever since their mother died, calling them by signaling them with a whistle and forcing them to line up in formation and do marches through the Austrian wilderness as their only form of recreation.

Maria, who’d already got herself in trouble big-time with the Mother Superior of her convent (Maria Friedman) and the committee of three nuns who, in the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,” debate whether she should be admitted to the next order of nun-hood since, though she’s suitably devout, she’s constantly running off the reservation and into the Austrian hills to do things like sing the show’s famous title song. The show was done in Britain (there’d been an earlier live telecast from the U.S. in 2013 with Carrie Underwood, an intriguing choice, as Maria) and there were some interesting backstage glimpses after the musical itself, including the fact that they needed 14 child actors to play the von Trapp kids in case one of them got sick, had an accident or for some other reason couldn’t continue and another could immediately be pressed into service as a replacement. The Sound of Music actually premiered on Broadway in 1959 with an American cast – Mary Martin as Maria and Theodore Bikel as von Trapp (an irony since Bikel was Jewish and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been so viciously anti-Semitic a Jew would never have been allowed to become an officer in their military) – but it’s the 1965 film version with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in the leads that “froze” this story in the minds of modern-day audiences. Through much of the production I felt truly sorry for Kara Tointon, if only because the long shadow of Julie Andrews hung so heavily over her performance. Tointon tried her hardest to copy Andrews’ performance, especially her ultra-crisp intonation and diction while singing, trying to live up to her audience’s inevitable association with Andrews’ reading as the way this role should go. (It actually makes me curious to hear the original Broadway cast album on Columbia to hear how this role was performed by a leading actress with her own illustrious history before Julie Andrews grabbed it and set down her interpretation as the standard.)

Before the show there was an announcement to the effect that the writers (none of whom were credited; the only writing credits were to Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, who wrote the book for the stage musical) had attempted to blend the original script with the one Ernest Lehman wrote for the film, but in general they followed the play rather than the movie and used only one of the two new songs Richard Rodgers wrote for the film, “Something Good.” (With Hammerstein dead, for this and the other song added to the movie, “Confidence in Me,” Rodgers wrote his own lyrics, with help from screenwriter Lehman and music director Saul Chaplin.) The telecast also followed the original stage order of the songs, which put “My Favorite Things” early in the show as a duet between Maria and the Mother Superior as the M.S. recalls her own pre-vows life before she sends Maria to the von Trapp home, and I think this lighthearted piece works better where Lehman’s script for the film put it: as the song Maria sings to the von Trapp kids to calm them during a lightning storm. (Later the song is reprised instrumentally at the big party scene that ends Act I, and of course I couldn’t help but joke, “Who’s that Black guy walking through here playing soprano saxophone?”)

This version of The Sound of Music was quite accomplished and entertaining, and in at least one respect it was better than the movie: it was considerably more serious about the story’s political context. The story takes place on the eve of the Anschluss, Adolf Hitler’s non-violent takeover of Austria in 1938 and his incorporation of Austria into his Greater Germany, and though this version was only two hours long (the film ran nearly three hours), the script drops a lot more hints of the burgeoning political situation. There’s an early argument between von Trapp’s eldest daughter, Liesl (Evelyn Hoskins), and her boyfriend Franz (Paul Copley), just before they sing the “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” duet, in which she insists that they’re Austrian and he says, “Some people think we’d be better off being German.” The telecast also restored a song cut from the movie, “No Way to Stop It,” in which von Trapp’s fiancée Elsa Schräder (Katherine Kelly) and the family’s friend Max Detweiler (Alexander Armstrong) declare their intention to compromise and live with the Nazi takeover of Austria rather than try to resist. (There’s another song that was added back to this version after being deleted from the movie, “How Can Love Survive?,” one of those ironic Hammerstein lyrics in which the characters lament that von Trapp and Frau Schräder won’t be able to make their relationship work because they’re both rich and therefore they won’t have the experience of starving in a garret together.)

Overall, this version of The Sound of Music was effective – since it was almost a full hour shorter than the movie it seemed to zip through the story at warp speed, but it hit all the high points and the actors were personable and basically suited to their roles. Charles and I both had one big problem with the telecast: though he was handsome and sang well, Julian Oventon was just too young to play Captain von Trapp. He and Maria are supposed to come from different generations – if not a May-December romance theirs is certainly a May-September one – and Rodgers and Hammerstein had already done the situation of two people from different generations coming together in South Pacific (which also starred Mary Martin in the original Broadway production). Oventon had a better baritone voice than Christopher Plummer’s but he also looked too young to have had a 16-going-on-17-year-old daughter, and that hurt the verisimilitude of the project even though he and Tointon otherwise related well to each other on stage. Still, it’s hard not to like The Sound of Music – it’s what James Agee would have called “an efficient sentimental piece” and I was tearing up through much of it.