Alas, the production team eventually decided that, despite Plummer’s hard work, he would have to be dubbed. Director Wise diplomatically suggested to Plummer that his singing was undermining the fine work he was doing in the acting department; he graciously relented to have his voice dubbed by Bill Lee. (Plummer’s singing didn’t seem to bother the Tony Awards voters nine years later when he was named Best Actor in a Musical for Cyrano, performing seven songs a night…)
Lehman kept the original setting of “Edelweiss,” during the Festival competition, but Wise was able to expand the reach of the scene by having the Captain, clearly moved by his own imminent departure from his homeland, ask the assembled crowd to join in the anthem with him. The moment owes something to the singing of “La Marseillaise” in the movie Casablanca—in both cases, the Nazis glower ineffectually as the chorus of native patriotism swells around them.
“Edelweiss’” has evoked so much patriotic feeling that in 1984, the Reagan White House supposedly thought the song was, in fact, the actual Austrian national anthem and had the song played to honor Austrian president Rudolf Kirchschlager during a state visit. As one of the honored guests at the White House dinner that night was the Baroness Maria von Trapp—aged seventy-nine—one supposes the lapse could be forgiven.
As the fictional Maria reminds us, the very beginning is a very good place to start. A very good place to end would be with the final words written by one of the masters of the lyrical arts, Oscar Hammerstein.
EPILOGUE
A LONG, LONG WAY TO RUN
And I’ll sit once more: on a break during the arduous rehearsals for The Sound of Music Live!, Carrie Underwood contemplates the challenge ahead (in front of a conspicuously un-Salzburgian backdrop).
Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, The Sound of Music climbed every media mountain in view—stage, screen, sound recordings—with one exception: television. That would change on February 29, 1976 when the American network ABC broadcast the film version in primetime to explosive ratings. NBC bought out the rights several years later and showed it in various shortened versions (some lamentably excised of favorite things) over the years, until they broadcast an uncut four-hour version (with commercials and featurettes) as a primetime special in 1995, hosted by none other than Julie Andrews.
But it was only a matter of time before the medium of television exploited the many possibilities of The Sound of Music. Several years into the 21st century, two major television projects—one from the U.K., the other from the U.S.—would add immeasurably to the profile of The Sound of Music; the key to each would be the unpredictability of live television.
There had been many musicals filmed in front of a live audience on broadcast television in the U.S., but a full-blown live musical broadcast hadn’t really been attempted since the late 1950s. Mary Martin starred as Peter Pan in a 1955 version of the musical aired live (though not in front of a live audience) on NBC; conceived as a way of inducing families to purchase the innovation of color television, Peter Pan was such a phenomenon that it was restaged for live television the following year. Realizing that it was essential to archive the show for posterity, NBC restaged Peter Pan for the third time in 1960, finally committing it to videotape in a New York studio. Mary Martin was hooked up to the guy wires once again, while continuing her “day job”—which was, of course, playing Maria in The Sound of Music on Broadway. In 1957, CBS executives, impressed with Peter Pan’s blockbuster ratings (65 million people watched the first airing), countered with an original live family musical of their own: Cinderella, with a score by Rodgers and Hammerstein and starring Julie Andrews; when it aired in March of that year, it was watched by 107 million viewers. So, the path for a live television experience of The Sound of Music was pioneered by the first two great actresses to play Maria von Trapp—and, in their way, they opened a door that gave the property an even longer way to run.
Connie Fisher’s triumphant curtain call for The Sound of Music at the London Palladium, 2006.
Way back, towards the end of the 1950s, before one note of The Sound of Music was written, the challenge was for a star—Mary Martin—to find the right vehicle. Fifty years later, for the first major stage revival of the 21st century, the challenge was for the vehicle to find the right star.
Taking up the challenge was one of the leading lights of the modern musical theater: Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lord Lloyd Webber had been a fan of Richard Rodgers since he was a youngster. When he was thirteen, he wrote a fan letter to Rodgers prior to the West End premiere of The Sound of Music; Rodgers was kind enough to meet with him and arrange for a ticket for opening night. As early as 2000, The Sound of Music had begun to stimulate Lloyd Webber’s producing instinct. As he said in an interview, “Wouldn’t it be great to do a version of The Sound of Music with a girl who really was getting onto eighteen, who could really climb a tree and scrape her knee—and I thought it would be worth investigating whether we could do a production of it that was much more on the button.”
Things looked particularly promising in early 2006, when it seemed as if Lloyd Webber had found the perfect star for his vehicle: film actress Scarlett Johansson, who, at that time, was best known for Lost in Translation and Match Point. The twenty-one-year-old starlet Johansson “gave an impromptu rendition of songs from the hit movie in front of a restaurant full of people to prove her singing credentials and obsession with the musical,” according to Lloyd Webber. However, in addition to musical chops, Johansson also had a film star’s sheaf of commitments; in the end, Lloyd Webber and Johansson were unable to come to terms. And so, Lloyd Webber and his co-producer on the project, David Ian, decided to do a 180-degree reversal. “I said to David, if we can’t get a star, I don’t want to abandon [the project], so we’ll just have to make a star.” They would turn to a unique 21st-century phenomenon to find their Maria: the first theater-based reality-show talent competition, inevitably titled “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”
By July of 2006, BBC1 had moved the pieces quickly and efficiently into place. “Maria” would be broadcast in eight parts, on Saturday evenings, culminating on September 16 in a program that would anoint a Maria in front of nearly eight million viewers. The winner would be guaranteed a six-month contract to play the lead in a West End run of The Sound of Music—an unprecedented opportunity. Small wonder, then, that thousands of potential Marias poured forth from all corners of the U.K. and from a host of occupations—professional singers to police officers—each willing and eager for the chance to embody their childhood heroine. As one hopeful contestant averred, she was a natural for Maria because she also loved children, sang on the way to work, and “fancied Christopher Plummer.” These battalions of Marias had to face a three-person judging panel; lording it over the three judges, as it were, was Lord Lloyd Webber himself, exercising an executive privilege—the rules of the competition permitted him to “save” one Maria per week, no matter how the television audience voted.
The judges whittled down the thousands of applicants to 54 contestants, who were then sent to be trained at “Maria School,” an academy constructed solely for producing viable Austrian governesses with guitar. Eventually, through much discussion and horse-trading between Lloyd Webber and the judges, ten finalists moved on to the part of the selection process where the television audience voted for their favorite.
There is something definitely Cinderella-like in the story of The Sound of Music and the glass slipper of West End success was ultimately a perfect fit for the 23-year-old Connie Fisher. Raised in Wales, Fisher moved to London at the age of 19, on a full scholarship to Mountview drama school, which concentrates on musical theater. She was graduated in 2005 and auditioned and auditioned for every West End job that came her way—always the bridesmaid, but never Cosette, or Truly Scrumptious, or the Woman in White. Fisher worked at a Pizza Express restaurant and sold advertising over the phone, to make ends meet—her only professional stage work was in a Christmas pantomime in the provinces. Lloyd
Webber’s insistence on a youthful Maria had won out and brought with it one unintended irony; this The Sound of Music is surely the first major production where the same understudy could—and would—cover both the actress playing Liesl and Connie Fisher as Maria.
By the time the show had its opening night on November 15, the tills were vibrantly alive; the box office had taken in over £13 million (US$20 million) in advance sales—four times the cost of the production itself and the largest advance in West End history. However, the main event at the London Palladium was whether or not Connie Fisher could pull it off. When the curtain fell, it was clear that 2,283 audience members had joined the ranks of the seven von Trapp children and their father; they had fallen in love with Maria. Connie Fisher even won the hearts of the highly skeptical British press. “[Fisher] effortlessly transcends the marketing gimmick to deliver a performance that isn’t just that of a well-meaning amateur …but comes from an expertly honed and self-assured professional,” wrote critic Mark Shenton of the Sunday Express. The Really Useful Group production ran until the early winter of 2009 and then began a successful tour throughout the U.K., featuring Fisher; during the run, rising musical star Summer Strallen replaced Fisher (presaged by a promotional tease in the storyline of the television soap opera Hollyoaks, where Strallen played a young actress auditioning for the part of Maria in the West End).
Perhaps something about the 2006 The Sound of Music revitalized the power of its stage origins; new productions were appearing all over the world for the first time in venues as far-flung as Uganda, Jordan, and Russia. Salzburg, the von Trapp family hometurf, received not one, but two very different premiere productions. Although the Salzburg Marionette Theater turned down Robert Wise’s initial request to appear in the movie back in 1964, and continued to stage their shortened versions of classical operas and ballets, in 2007, they turned to a more contemporary music theater piece: The Sound of Music. A world tour of their adaptation took America by storm. “The audience at first was reticent, knowing how ridiculous it would be to applaud puppets after a musical number,” wrote the New York Times. “But the amusing vertical-and-horizontal choreography of ‘Do-Re-Mi’—puppets aren’t limited by gravity—broke down all resistance; from then on there was clapping aplenty.” And the esteemed Salzburg Landestheater opened their own professional production in 2011 to admiring reviews and audience excitement. Apart from offering a stage setting that easily wins the award for “Most Accurate Rendition of the von Trapp Villa,” the production provocatively framed the show through the eyes of Rolf—who watched as his country submitted to the Nazis and the von Trapp family rebelled against their sphere of influence.
Are their strings being pulled by lonely goatherds? This imaginative version of Maria and the von Trapp children, courtesy of the Salzburg Marionette Theater.
Whatever frisson the Salzburg audience may have felt watching their own political history come alive in front of them, the most nerve-wracking interpretation of The Sound of Music came through living rooms all across America in the winter of 2013. The daring act of presenting the show live on broadcast television was balanced by producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who in addition to producing the Oscar-winning film of Chicago, had brought Broadway back to primetime with acclaimed television versions of such classics as Gypsy, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, and Annie. In 2012, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, Robert Greenblatt, brought a nine-million-dollar challenge to Zadan and Meron: could they produce a live broadcast of The Sound of Music? Its potential success hinged on two complementary challenges: the first was that the broadcast wasn’t going to be a second-rate remake of the movie, but, rather, a first-rate production of the stage musical. “We are hoping that audiences would want to see where the movie came from with the same story and with the same familiar songs but a little bit different,” said Zadan.
The other challenge was the complexity of a live broadcast: once the stage manager called “—and go!” at 8:00pm on Thursday, December 5, nothing could get in the way of the von Trapp family story—not Nazis, not flubbed lines, not even an accidentally detached cable (although the orchestral track was taped, not live, there was a live pianist playing along, in case a transmission feed went wonky). The Sound of Music Live! required two directors (one versed in the stage drama, the other versed in live camerawork); six sets lined up next to each other inside a huge former airplane factory in Long Island; and twelve separate cameras, each swiveling and ducking out of each other’s way in a carefully choreographed cinematic ballet. The show also required some skilled Broadway veterans, such multiple Tony Award-winners as Laura Benanti as the Baroness, Christian Borle as Max Detweiller, and Audra McDonald, whose gilded voice brought a new currency to the Mother Abbess’ inspirational songs. Stephen Moyer, a classically trained British actor with singing experience, best know as a vampire on the HBO serial, True Blood, brought a dignified romantic mien to Captain von Trapp.
Rachel Kavanaugh’s production for the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London, 2012, cleverly melds the fountain of Salzburg’s Mirabell gardens with the limited resources of the outdoor stage.
The hardest job, of course, belonged to the one actress who had to stay live—and on top of it—for the entire three hours. In this case, the producers brought someone on board whom America had been inviting into their living rooms and iPods by the millions: the country music superstar, Carrie Underwood. Underwood became the American Idol talent contest winner in 2005 at the age of 22 and subsequently shot to fame as the reigning queen (or princess) of country music, festooned with every music award one could possibly win, including six Grammys. Only one thing was missing from her resume: she had never been in a musical, not even back in her small-town Oklahoma high school. “My school was so small, we didn’t really have drama or things like that,” she told a reporter for New York’s Newsday. But, she parried, “I’ve always been up for a challenge.”
A challenge it certainly was. The sheer number of moving pieces could have presaged a disaster, but the evening of the broadcast went smoothly. Indeed, in many ways, the virtue of live television added some grace notes to the material. When Underwood left the von Trapp household at the end of the “first act” (actually prior to a commercial break, thereby begging the issue of where the television version placed the intermission), she simply marched towards a wall, which flew up to reveal the abbey, and she marched right through its corridors—a literal manifestation of “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window.”
Carrie Underwood leads the children in “Do, Re, Mi” in The Sound of Music Live!, marching towards a resonant outdoor location.
Broadway superstar Audra McDonald as the Mother Abbess reviews some of her favorite things with Maria, just the way Lindsay and Crouse planned it.
Fans of the Broadway incarnation of The Sound of Music couldn’t have been more pleased; the live broadcast was more or less an exact replica of the Lindsay/Crouse text. Songs for the Baroness and Max— “How Can Love Survive?” and “No Way to Stop It”—reached a wide audience for the first time. That said, there were more than a few nods in the film’s direction: Maria lead the children in a march around a fountain at the end of “Do Re Mi” (and Underwood jumped the octave, à la Julie Andrews) and “Something Good” was interpolated from the movie to replace “An Ordinary Couple.” Audiences only familiar with the film version got to see “My Favorite Things,” “Do Re Mi,” and “The Lonely Goatherd” in their original contexts, although the television correspondent from Time magazine apparently didn’t get the memo, complaining that “they [the producers] repurposed this song [“My Favorite Things”] here because Audra got to sing it.”
No matter: the heavily promoted event was a ratings success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Over 18.5 million viewers watched the live event throughout, while an additional 20 million viewers tuned in at one point or another (apparently, five million viewers followed and responded to the event on Twitter as well).
&
nbsp; A concert hall inside a musical inside a television studio: Christian Borle as Max reveals the winners of the Kaltzberg Festival as Stephen Moyer, Underwood, and children look on.
When the live Sound of Music was rebroadcast by NBC two weeks later, it picked up an additional national audience, adding up to a total of 44 million viewers for both broadcasts. Even the competition—ABC’s annual Christmas broadcast of the film version—did better than usual, confirming Anthony Lane’s comment that The Sound of Music “confers a happy ending to all those who touch its hem.” (The show was broadcast in the U.K.—on tape, obviously—on Channel 5 at Eastertime in 2014.) Interestingly, the largest concentration of viewers came not from huge media outlets such as New York or Los Angeles, but from Carrie Underwood’s home state, Oklahoma, which has always shown its unswerving support for Rodgers and Hammerstein. Although many reviewers were unable to part with their fond memories of the 1965 movie, Underwood certainly joined the ranks of Mary Martin and Julie Andrews in fostering a renewed interest in live television musicals; based on the success of The Sound of Music Live!, plans were immediately made to revive the tradition, including a new live version of—starting at the very beginning—Peter Pan, scheduled on NBC for December of 2014 and starring Allison Williams and Christopher Walken.
In fact, The Sound of Music Live! was such a phenomenon that Saturday Night Live ran its own (somewhat witless) parody of The Sound of Music Live! the following week (NBC produces Saturday Night Live as well), but that’s the price one has to pay for becoming a national media event. The Sound of Music has penetrated so deeply into the consciousness of popular culture, that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, parody must be the sincerest form of immortality. Back in 1966, MAD magazine, America’s foremost satirical comic magazine, became the first publication to parody The Sound of Music with its version of The Sound of Money, in which the “von Tripes” seem particularly astute about how to wring both tears and dollar bills from the movie audience.
The Sound of Music Companion: The official companion to the world's most beloved musical Page 13