Canada’s Stratford Festival keeps bringing in Broadway pros to stage musicals and several powerhouse directors from the United States to recreate their landmark versions of modern drama classics, but this great classical repertory theater’s recent champions remain Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino’s uniformly superb revivals of classics and resident director/choreographer Donna Feore’s landmark restagings of major musicals. I don’t know whether she or anyone else will ever equal her 2013 astonishingly perfect recreation of Fiddler On the Roof--the best version I’ve seen, including all the Broadway productions--but this Sound of Music is a complete delight.
Like Fiddler, this musical rejoices in and fights for a homeland, resists totalitarian persecution, ends with its heroes being driven from their home, and triumphs over prejudice with love. But it distorts the actual history considerably, gets gooey with sentimentality, and softens the ugly reality with pretense and rather banal showbiz conventions.
In his influential book Broadway Musicals, Martin Gottfried began his discussion of this one by stating that, The Sound of Music, their last show and a great success, was a work almost entirely devoid of artistic merit.” Gottfried based that assessment on the relative lack of inventive, creative new techniques in the composition of songs that are “simple waltzes” and lyrics that get cutesy in the show’s treatment of the Trapp Family children who dominate much of the action. But the show is greatly beloved for its remarkable charm in treating those children as protagonists and offering an optimistic, even comic, resolution to an unhappy history. And virtually every song is pleasing and memorable. Sometimes the familiar can also have artistic merit.
This is a great-looking, uniformly impressively performed production. From the imposing but austere-toned Abbey to the elegant von Trapp home and its lovely garden, Michael Gianfrancesco’s swiftly altering sets are handsome and made more affecting by Michael Walton’s downright showy lighting.
All the singing and dancing is topnotch. Beautiful Stephanie Rothenberg as Maria has a lovely soprano for the title song as well as much charm in “Do-Re-Mi” and “My Favorite Things” and the rest.
Anita Krause’s Mother Abbess competes for vocal honors, as intended, ending Act I with a thrilling “Climb Every Mountain.” But it is top actor Ben Carlson, as Captain von Trapp, who begins the show’s constantly growing emotional involvement in all that singing. When he finally drops the hard-edged, killjoy discipline that he has adopted in heartbreak after his young wife’s sudden death, von Trapp is persuaded to join his children in singing. And he almost bursts into tears. The audience certainly does.
There’s more weepy sentiment to come, but mostly, from that point on, the show is a party. Even the smaller part of the mean old, nasty Nazi, Herr Zeller, is played with believable, human distinction by Stratford stalwart, Peter Hutt. And the dancing, some of it excitingly acrobatic, is as fine as the rich-voiced large cast’s singing. The family foils the Nazis, maintains their true Austrian integrity (Broadway style), pairs off romantically, and has the audience standing and clapping and singing along. It’s a dark history become a fairy tale, but it is also one of the best-loved and most profitably received shows in history. And the sound of its music, when presented this brilliantly, is sweet indeed.
