Associate Press
March 5, 1998
On Stage: The Sound of Music
By MICHAEL KUCHWARA
Surely you remember that panoramic shot of an apron-clad Julie Andrews, her arms outstretched, twirling through a vast Alpine meadow as she sings the title tune.
How could you forget the opening scene of The Sound of Music, the most successful movie musical of all time?
Yet before the last musical written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II made it big on celluloid, it was a major Broadway hit, running for 1,443 performances. Despite being a staple on the stock and amateur circuit, a lot of people don't seem to know the theatrical version.
"The movie has erased the memory of the stage show," says James Hammerstein, Oscar's son, who has directed it three times in the last six years.
Now, for its first Broadway revival in nearly 40 years, The Sound of Music has to confront its super-popular cinematic cousin.
It can more than hold its own, according to director Susan H. Schulman, who made her mark overseeing such Broadway productions as The Secret Garden and a revival of Sweeney Todd.
"The stage show actually is edgier than the movie," Schulman says. The story, of course, is the tale of Maria, the spirited postulant-turned-governess, who charms the sober-sided Captain von Trapp, teaches his children to sing and flees Austria with them, right after the Nazi takeover in 1938.
"The movie cut out quite a bit of the references to the political situation," Schulman explains. "It also dropped the most political song in the show, There's No Way To Stop It, which is actually a song about whether you can sit back and let events happen or whether you need to take a stand."
The story and score were the work of a quartet of old pros.
The stage adaptation was done by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (Russel Crouse), veteran writers of musical comedy librettos for such shows as Anything Goes and the authors of the long-running comedy Life With Father. Their collaboration with Rodgers (music) and Hammerstein (lyrics) on The Sound of Music was, by all accounts, a happy one.
"They were such pals and admired and liked each other so much that it probably looked like a good party," says Mary Rodgers, Richard Rodgers' daughter. "These guys were all from the same generation. They all grew up in the theatre at the same time. They spoke the same language. They had a lot in common. Everybody even liked everybody else's wives."
Although some connected with the revival expressed fear that theatregoers were going to want the movie, Schulman had faith in the original.
"Audiences are very smart and they will go with you as long as you don't mislead them," the director says. "We start the show in a way that they announce, 'Oh, this isn't the movie. This is different'. And because we do it immediately, they go on the journey with us."
The stage version begins simply - with the nuns singing - and the revival follows the original.
"It's important you start with that cloistered world before you open up into the freedom of the mountains," Schulman says. "That immediately tells you what Maria's problem is. She can't stay in this cloistered, closed-off environment for long."
James Hammerstein says there were reasons for the quiet, intimate opening of the stage version.
"If you know the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon, they all start small," Hammerstein says. "Dad and Dick were very sharp dramatists. They didn't want to do anything large before you knew the characters who were doing it. They let you get to know the people - and then they moved you."
What surprised the new production team is how well the original musical story was told.
"Rodgers and Hammerstein were masters at musical-theatre structure in the way that they allowed the music to tell a lot of the story. Today, I think, a lot of people don't trust the music to tell the story," Schulman says. "They think they have to tell it again in the book. It is, after all, called The Sound of Music."
Yet The Sound of Music was not its original title. The musical was first called The Singing Heart, according to Anna Crouse, widow of Russel Crouse. It was Rodgers who suggested the title that stuck.
The idea for the show began with director Vincent Donehue, who was looking for a vehicle for Mary Martin. He called Leland Heyward, who had produced many of Lindsay and Crouse's shows and was one of the producers of South Pacific, another Rodgers and Hammerstein show.
The musical originally was to have featured old songs associated with the real-life von Trapps with one or two new numbers. When Rodgers and Hammerstein came aboard, they decided it needed an entirely new score. The others agreed.
"Howard and Russel started working ahead of Dick and Oscar because they were doing Flower Drum Song at that time," Anna Crouse recalls. "When Dick and Oscar finally were available, all four of them began to talk it out together - where the music would go and where it would carry the plot.
"Oscar went off and wrote the lyrics first, which he always did. And then Dick came up with those wonderful songs in about 10 minutes. He was such a fast worker."
It helped that Rodgers and Hammerstein knew they were writing for Martin, who starred in their South Pacific.
"The Sound of Music was tailor-made for Mary - including the fact that she could yodel," Anna Crouse says. "They knew exactly what she could and could not do."
In the new production, Maria is played by Rebecca Luker, who appeared as Magnolia in the recent Broadway revival of Show Boat.
"The way Rebecca works and the way this company works is very much as an ensemble," Schulman says. "Yet I have tried to make all the characters have a payoff in the show."
Schulman says that as wonderful and as beautiful as the movie is, "it is strangely not in its period. Even if you look at the costumes, they are not 1938. They are the 1950s.
"We have tried to put it more securely in the period in which it takes place to evoke a kind of fairy-tale village," she says. "The whole creative team went to Salzburg. The thing about Salzburg is that it is so unreal. It looks like a fairy-tale village, and then you think about what happened when the Nazis marched in and covered all this architecture with big red flags."
So why was the original - and then the movie - such a success?
"I think because it is terribly romantic," Mary Rodgers says. "The idea of somebody who thinks they want to be a nun and then falls in love with this heavenly character is just a wonderful love story.
"Often our problem with the stage version is not to have to do exactly what they do in the movie," Rodgers says with a laugh. "They come out of the ladies bathroom, often proclaiming, 'Well, she didn't do that in the movie'. There wouldn't have been a movie if there hadn't been a good notion to begin with."