Melody Betts and Charlotte Maltby perform “My Favorite Things” (Matthew Murphy/Kennedy Center)
A big stage like the Kennedy Center’s Opera House requires a big show with big sets and big voices. What better way to fill that space than with one of our most beloved musicals?
Directed by Broadway veteran Jack O’Brien (who put on hit adaptations of The Full Monty and Hairspray), a touring production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music is in town. The show is an adaptation not of the 1965 movie starring Julie Andrews but of the 1959 Broadway production (itself based on a 1956 German film about the Von Trapp family). How do you solve a problem like adapting such an iconic show? With a strong cast that for the most part sells these familiar favorite things.
The first sound you hear is prayerful: after the nuns chant the “Preludium,” the stage opens to a lush mountain landscape outside the abbey, where Maria (Charlotte Maltby) sings the title song—and it will give you chills. This is music you’ve probably grown up with, and to see and hear it performed live gives you goosebumps.
Maltby comes from a long line of theater people, the daughter of a theatrical director and he granddaughter of a bandleader, and she acquits herself well. If she is a somewhat younger and more puppy-like Maria, this sets up the play as one of her coming of age and finding her vocation.
The central conflict—the “problem” of Maria—is whether she stays at the abbey or finds her way in the world. As the Mother Superior (Melody Betts) explains, the abbey isn’t a place to hide, though ironically her new life will require her to flee the world’s troubles. Maria, of course, leaves the abbey to serve as the governess for seven children, whose widowed father Captain Von Trapp (Nicholas Rodriguez) doesn’t allow his children to play or sing.
You know how it all ends up, and while the nuns and the children are all effectively played, the love story between Maria and the Captain feels diminished. Rodriguez has a good voice but a stiff presence; this works for the first act’s stern patriarch, but you never get the sense that Maria has taught him to loosen up and love. In one of the play’s most distracting departures from the movie, one of the kids has to tell you that Maria and the Captain have chemistry, explaining that he stumbled over a performance of “Edelweiss” that you don’t see on stage (the song isn’t performed until the second act).
Which makes this Maria’s show%#8212;and the Mother Superior’s. Betts delivers a show-stopping “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” as she encourages Maria to find her vocation outside the cloister.
From the abbey (depicted largely by a simple black screen and a projected stained-glass window) to the mountain scenery, sets evoke a higher majesty that uplifts these characters. Yet when the Von Trapps perform for the Salzburg music festival and huge red banners with swastikas emblazoned unfurl on the stage, it’s chilling, the family appearing small and vulnerable amid these ominous larger forces. Can they overcome them? Can we? The Sound of Music is about finding your voice and inner strength in difficult times; much as Maria unifies the Von Trapp children’s multitude of voices into a harmonious choir, this is a show that can unite us with its art.
At the Kennedy Center Opera House through July 16. $49-$169. Buy tickets here.
