The Hartford Courant
March 13, 1998
There's 'Music' in Luker
By MALCOLM JOHNSON
The hills are truly alive in Broadway's splendid revival of "The Sound of Music" at the Martin Beck Theatre. Not only does the great house resound with the uplifting and inspiring voices of Rebecca Luker's fresh, idealistic Maria and Patti Cohenour's Dresden-doll-delicate Mother Abbess, but Susan H. Schulman's production has a magical look, too. Heidi Ettinger's scenery abounds in glories, specifically the Austrian Alps, which glow with a special air of misty mystery and ethereal grandeur.
Schulman has treated the 1959 Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II musical with devotion, even veneration. The saccharine level of parts of the book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and too many of Hammerstein's lyrics, remains cloyingly high. And the von Trapp tots, in their pristine sailor suits, are terribly cute in a proper Austrian way. But Luker's sturdy, wholesome Maria with her tightly braided hair and scrubbed mein is true and wonderful, never too sweet, and even the Captain von Trapp of England's visiting Michael Siberry projects a stuffy, upper- class charm, and sings strongly, too. Schulman has managed to kindle an oddly engaging love between them. When they dance the old-fashioned, complex, formal steps choreographed by Michael Lichtefeld, the pas de deux builds a surprisingly seductive sensuality that forces Luker's Maria to awaken to the dangers of her feelings, and pull away.
In their final collaboration, the men credited with reinventing the American musical committed an alarmingly retro act: they returned to the operetta. In its Mitteleuropa milieu and in consciously antiquated songs like "Edelweiss," the "Oklahoma!" / "Carousel" team went back to the ethos of "The Student Prince" and "The Merry Widow." Yet, of course, Hammerstein, even the apostle of one-world liberalism, contrasted the Ruritanian sunshine of the von Trapp mountain estate with the darkness falling over Europe. As "The Sound of Music" moves toward its ending -- the escape from Paradise -- more and more characters sport Nazi armbands. Before they slip away into Switzerland, a spectacular climbing-every-mountain feat as engineered by Ettinger, the von Trapp family singers find themselves performing before a huge red, white and black banner emblazoned with a swastika.
Thus does "The Sound of Music" move from the sacred to the profane. Eliminating the overture, Schulman opens the show with the spiritual harmonies of Maria's convent sisters. Ettinger's settings shift from the austere cloisters to the fanciful von Trapp villa, which resembles the summer house of a Vienna palace, as the music changes from holy to operetta-like and folkish (the first jarring note comes from the nuns, however, as they wrestle with the problem named "Maria").
As she cannot resist gallivanting about Mount Ettinger, which opens like an giant iris shot, Maria is sent to think things over at the von Trapp's aerie. Romance blooms, but the baron/captain is already spoken for, more or less, by a rich Viennese sophisticate, Elsa Schraeder, who exudes knowing sexuality as embodied by Jan Maxwell, which contrasts with Luker's radiant innocence. Maxwell projects something of the worldliness of Oskar Schindler, though her Elsa seems all too ready to collaborate with the ridiculous Germans.
The children adore Maria, who has taught them to sing the oh-so adorable "Do-Re-Mi" and "Favorite Things." So anti-Nazism and music triumph as Maria learns to "Climb Every Mountain" from Cohenour's silver-throated Mother Abbess, whose small hands are as eloquent as her voice.
From the leads right down to the smallest child, the impish Gretl of tiny Ashley Rose Orr, this "Sound of Music" has been cast with loving care, what with Patricia Conolly as the housekeeper, John Curless as the butler and Jeanne Lehman as the mistress of postulants. Fred Applegate makes a cherubic and sly Salzburg promoter of Max Detweiler, lending ambiguity to the man who advocates compromise with the Nazis, but helps to save the singing family. As young Rolf Gruber, another Austrian with conscience, despite his armband, Dashiell Eaves pairs touchingly with Sara Zelle, the oldest of the children, whose Liesl has a European feeling that the more beautiful all-American Lauri Peters lacked in the original production.
Overall, in fact, the greatest triumph of Schulman's production is her ability to make the people of this musical strangely real, and thus more affecting than expected. Whether this revival can sell tickets without a big name is open to question.
But Hallmark, whose greeting- card posters proclaim its role as producer, has cared enough to send the very best in anointing Luker as a Maria who far surpasses Mary Martin, and perhaps even Julie Andrews.
Copyright 1998 The Hartford Courant Company