Keeping the Hills Alive with “The Sound of Music”

We all know how The Sound of Music opens, right? It starts with a helicopter shot of Julie Andrew on an Austrian mountaintop, spinning ecstatically in place as she carols, “The hills are alive . . .”   Yes, that’s the oh-so-familiar movie version, one of the all-time box-office champions. But The Sound of Music was first a hit Broadway show, starring Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel. Last night I saw a Broadway-bound revival, which brought back memories of years gone by, when – at a huge barn-like auditorium called the Los Angeles Philharmonic Hall – I first encountered The Sound of Music, with Florence Henderson at the head of a touring production.

The stage version of The Sound of Music, based on the story of Maria von Trapp and her musical brood, starts not with a helicopter shot but with a chorus of nuns singing a joyful “Alleluia.” (My father, who did not have much use for nuns, once wondered at this point whether he’d stumbled into the wrong show.)  Needless to say, some of movie’s greatest charms are missing from the stage version. On stage,  mountains have to be portrayed by painted backdrops, and you can’t show that gaggle of little von Trapps biking down country lanes, and rowing on country lakes. So the joy in nature felt by the leading characters must be accepted . . . yes! . . . on faith.

Still, I was fond of the stage version because it seemed franker about the other side of the mountain, the ongoing Nazi threat that balances the sweetness and light at the show’s core. The movie does retain both Captain von Trapp’s wealthy, worldly fiancée and his impresario friend who makes a virtue of expedience. But in the movie adaptation, their two songs have been removed. “How Can Love Survive?” is a cynical ode to romance among the very rich. “There’s No Way to Stop It” is a comic ditty dedicated to the wisdom of celebrating the men in charge, whomever they might be, in order to save one’s own skin. This second song makes perfect sense in a tale about leaving one’s homeland rather than capitulating to the dictates of the Nazi Anschluss. Beneath the song’s apparent light-heartedness, it’s a bold statement, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it again.

            This new production, which began in L.A., does right by the political forces that are gathering. A particularly vivid touch involves the climactic musical competition in which the Trapp Family Singers appear. When they take the stage in their quaint dirndls and lederhosen, the backdrop behind them is a huge set of red banners flaunting the Nazi swastika, which was more than enough to send shivers down my spine. Casting works well too. Director Jack O’Brien points out in a program note that when Mary Martin starred as Maria on stage, she was 47 years old. Julie Andrews, cast in the movie after becoming America’s sweetheart in Mary Poppins, was nearly 30. The new Maria is (heaven help us!) a college sophomore in her first big role. Kerstin Anderson, just 21, is tall and gangly, with a lovely voice and lots of infectious spunk. She’s believable as a postulant in an abbey, and we can totally buy her falling for Captain von Trapp (Ben Davis), who’s played a bit younger than usual and looks something like a bearded Ryan Gosling. The moppets (envied, I’m sure, by every kid in the audience) are well differentiated.  And Ashley Brown, as the Mother Abbess, raises the rafters with “Climb Every Mountain.” The Sound of Music sounds very good indeed.

Christopher Plummer Makes an Impression

Today the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of The Sound of Music will bring Captain Von Trapp to his knees. As part of the festivities, Christopher Plummer has been invited to leave his handprints in the forecourt of Hollywood’s famous Chinese Theatre. And he’s tickled pink about the honor.

I’ve been a bit in love with Christopher Plummer since long before I ever saw him perform. As a stage-struck kid in SoCal, I read plays and kept up with Broadway news. Several of the shows in which Plummer starred were so entrancing on the page that I knew he must have been wonderful. My tastes were rather literary, and I loved J.B., a verse drama by the poet Archibald MacLeish that used a circus tent as a setting for a stylized rendition of the Biblical story of Job. Under Elia Kazan’s direction, Pat Hingle played an Everyman figure caught in the middle of a tussle between a God-like Raymond Massey and a Satanic Plummer. Of course it was the dark role played by Plummer that captured my imagination. In the following decade, he took on another near-demonic figure in Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt for the Sun. This time he was the ruthless conquistador Francisco Pizarro, butting heads with the noble and doomed Incan lord Atahualpa (played in a loincloth by, of all people, David Carradine!)

I never saw Plummer perform the great Shakespearean roles: Iago (opposite James Earl Jones), Macbeth, King Lear. I was, however, dazzled by his portrayal of the swashbuckling Cyrano de Bergerac, in a version of Rostand’s play televised in 1962 on the wonderful old Hallmark Hall of Fame.  

And of course the man has made movies. The Sound of Music was one of his very first feature films, and the role of the gloomy widower who blossoms into Julie Andrews’ romantic swain never struck me as ideal casting for Plummer. But he plunged into movie-making, appearing in many guises in everything from Inside Daisy Clover to The Return of the Pink Panther to A Beautiful Mind to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In 1999’s The Insider (based on a true story about the evil machinations of Big Tobacco) he won acclaim for his impersonation of TV journalist Mike Wallace. He was first nominated for an Oscar in 2010, playing a dying Tolstoy in The Last Station, then took home a statuette two years later, as another dying man who owns up to his homosexuality in the rueful Beginners. (At 82, he was the oldest person ever to win an acting Oscar.)

Now he’s featured in the new Al Pacino film, Danny Collins. This and other upcoming roles appeal to him because, as he told the L.A. Times, “they're not all boring, old men dying.  Even though I am kind of 85 now, I think I can pass for late 60s, 70, so maybe there's a few more years yet. I'd love to play a dashing young thing, though, who jumps in and out of Rolls Royces, who has a huge wardrobe that I could take home afterward.”

Plummer’s still-youthful spirit was well on display a year ago when he brought to L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre a selection of brilliant words, brilliantly spoken. A Word or Two is a one-man show devoted to his love of the gorgeous language of poets and playwrights. It’s highly personal but not confessional: we learn next to nothing about his three marriages nor his feelings toward Julie Andrews. What we do learn is how a lonely little boy took to Lewis Carroll, and to Shakespeare, finding joy in speaking great words aloud.   

Roadshow! -- Listening to the Sound of Money

Oh what a day!  June 20 marks the release of Jersey Boys, yet another attempt to bring a Broadway hit musical to the screen. There’ve been other movie adaptations of Broadway musicals in recent years: Les Misérables, Sweeney Todd, Mamma Mia!, and Dreamgirls immediately come to mind. Some have had distinguished casts, and have picked up a few critics’ prizes. But with the exception of Chicago in 2002, none has been an outstanding success. This time around, the director is Clint Eastwood, who’s insisting that Jersey Boys is not a musical so much as a dramatic story that happens to feature music. We’ll soon see how well that approach works, and whether today’s moviegoers can be persuaded to overlook the dreaded “m” (as in “musical”) word when they choose an evening’s entertainment.

There was a time when Hollywood was all about musicals. Once The Jazz Singer introduced synchronized sound, every studio rushed to make films that featured “all talking -- all singing -- all dancing.” The marquees of 1930s movie palaces touted Busby Berkeley’s backstage extravaganzas, with their oodles of beautiful girls dancing in formation. Later that decade, audiences thrilled to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who specialized in elegant dancefloor tête-à-têtes. The 1950s were the great years of Gene Kelly, the inventive genius behind such classics as An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.

By the late 1950s, moviegoers would just as soon stay home and watch that newfangled wonder, television. That’s when Hollywood moguls—looking to compete with the tiny black-and-white screens in America’s living rooms—turned to Broadway. They shelled out big bucks for the film rights to stage musicals that could be filmed in living color, then augmented by stereophonic sound.  It worked, sometimes very well. West Side Story (1961) was an enormous critical and popular success. My Fair Lady (1964) was a hit too, despite the casting of a leading lady (Audrey Hepburn) whose singing voice needed to be dubbed. After Julie Andrews, the stage star of My Fair Lady, was snubbed in favor of Hepburn, she was quickly snapped up by the Walt Disney Company, which cleverly cast her in a charming original musical, Mary Poppins.

By this time, every studio was vying to make the biggest, splashiest, most lucrative musical of all. A fascinating book called Roadshow!, by my colleague Matthew Kennedy, is subtitled “The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s.” Matt chronicles how Hollywood’s determination to produce spectacular roadshow musicals (the kind with reserved seats and intermissions) eventually killed off the genre. His opening chapter, “The Musical that Ate Hollywood,” is devoted to a Broadway adaptation that was so successful it saved Twentieth-Century Fox from ruin, following Fox’s monstrously expensive 1963 production of Cleopatra.

Of course I’m talking about The Sound of Music. This nun-and-Nazi fest hardly had instant appeal in Hollywood. Detractors called it The Sound of Mucus, and actor Doug McClure sniped that “Watching The Sound of Music is like being beaten to death by a Hallmark card.” But the film turned Julie Andrews into America’s new sweetheart. And a brilliant mountaintop opening that made maximum use of location shooting and a wide-screen format showed how cinema can breathe fresh life into a stagebound play. The film’s original release was so successful it lasted a full 4 ½ years. Only problem: all of Hollywood was now looking for the next Sound of Music. Doctor Dolittle, Camelot, Star!, Paint Your Wagon, Hello, Dolly! . . . . the costly flops just kept on coming. Which goes to prove that extravagance has its price.

The Sound of Music: The Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Two weeks ago, America’s TV sets were alive with the sound of music. Or something like that. At any rate, the Twittersphere was alive with the sound of big, fat Bronx cheers. Professional critics were not alone in proclaiming NBC’s live musical version of the beloved singing-nun story one of their LEAST favorite things.

As for me, I didn’t see it. True, the notion of a live stage musical playing itself out in my family-room transported me back to the lovely days of my TV-watching childhood  (Julie Andrews as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella! Mary Martin re-creating her stage performance as Peter Pan!) Still, I really wasn’t enticed by the prospect of watching American Idol winner Carrie Underwood try on Maria’s wimple. Frankly, an evening in the company of brown paper packages tied up with strings sounded like more fun to me.

Lord knows, it may be heresy (at least among several members of my immediate family), but I was never a devotee of the blockbuster 1965 film either. I know there are those who consider the casting of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer divinely inspired, and regard each of the Von Trapp tykes as a morsel of perfection. Yes, the Alpine scenery was undeniably glorious. I appreciated such touches as the casting of a leading lady who actually COULD sing (take that, Audrey Hepburn!) and the on-screen appearance of Marnie Nixon, who had famously dubbed the lilting soprano voices of Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Natalie Wood in West Side Story. Since Nixon wasn’t needed to stand in, vocally speaking, for the movie’s heroine, it was splendid that we finally got to see what she looked like, though a nun’s habit pretty much concealed her from view.

But even in those days, I was somewhat of a contrarian. And one reason I couldn’t fully adore the movie is that I treasured the memory of seeing The Sound of Music onstage. At L.A.’s old, barnlike Philharmonic Auditorium, I applauded Florence Henderson and the rest of the touring company. But  it was Mary Martin who starred on the cast album that my family played over and over. Those were the days when any middle-class family aspiring to culture boned up on Broadway’s latest hits. We owned the LPs of The Music Man, Fiddler on the Roof, and the entire Rodgers and Hammerstein output, and we knew every word of every song. No wonder I take Sound of Music so personally.

Much has been made of the death last week of Eleanor Parker, who played the aristocratic fiancée of Baron von Trapp in the 1965 film. (Some wags have insisted it was Carrie Underwood’s TV performance that killed her.) But fans of the movie rarely notice that two Rodgers and Hammerstein songs involving Parker’s character didn’t make it from stage to screen. Both “How Can Love Survive?” and “No Way to Stop It” are cynical ditties sung by the Baron’s sophisticated friends, who are all too ready to accept a Nazi takeover, so long as they can enjoy their own luxurious lives in peace. I loved these songs, because they added  to the stage musical a spoonful of vinegar that helped the treacle go down. In the movie version, though, the songs were cut.

Mary Martin was doubtless too old for the screen adaptation of Sound of Music and I can’t deny Julie Andrews’ fresh appeal. Israeli folksinger Theodore Bikel, who played the original Baron von Trapp, has had a curious movie career, playing men of widely varying nationalities. How many know he was Oscar-nominated for The Defiant Ones?