Arriving like a beached whale on the stage of the New York State Theater is a City Opera revival of “The Sound of Music” so inert, so devoid of charm, appeal, or amiability, that it would bore even a child. To be honest, “The Sound of Music” is a show whose appeal I’ve never understood. Even as a girl, I found the heroine’s choice between a dictatorial sea captain and the convent something of a non-issue. The only good songs are the grownup ones, the two with a trace of irony—“How Can Love Survive?” and “No Way to Stop It,” the cynical trio about self-preservation. In general, I think you would have to go far to find a famous musical with fewer champions in the adult world. Kenneth Tynan, reviewing the Broadway opening of “The Sound of Music” for this magazine in 1959, predicted that it might “come to be known in the annals of Broadway as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Great Leap Backward.” He wrote “It is as if the years that separate ‘Pal Joey’ from ‘Gypsy’ had dropped out of history.”
As Maria the current production casts Debby Boone, who strives for the wholesome, gung-ho earnestness that Julie Andrews brought to the role in the 1965 movie. Boone has a talent for yodeling but combines dramatic ineptitude with an apparent inability to sustain a note. Her physical performance is made up entirely of the gestures and postures of pop music and amateur theatricals. Most other aspects of the production are unremarkable: Laurence Guittard gives a suitable performance as the Captain, the children are all competent, and the sets and costumes (designed by Neil Peter Jampolis and Suzanne Mess, respectively) are pretty much what you’d expect. Marianne Tatum, as the worldly widow, and Werner Klemperer, in the Kurt Kasznar role, are easily the best things the production has going for it. (Even with laryngitis, from which he was suffering on opening night, Mr. Klemperer is nice to have around.) Most disappointing of all, perhaps is the way the production seems to fail the music. There are, after all, moments in this show when harmony takes center stage and the actual sound of music becomes more than usually pleasant—at the end of “Do-Re-Mi” and of “The Lonely Goatherd,” for instance, and in the sequence during which the title song is performed as a choral anthem. That even these moments should be lost in a revival staged by one of the city’s premier opera companies seems sad.
Why the City Opera elected to present this most familiar (and banal) of Broadway musicals is a mystery to me, but then we’ve been all though this before—with “The Music Man” and “The Pajama Game.” It looks as though the company’s practice of kicking off its season each year with a bad production of a show that doesn’t really need to be revived is here to stay.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, March 26, 1990