A mountain to climb
Cast, crew prepare for Sound of Music Live! broadcast
The Sound of Music Live!
Thursday, 8 p.m., NBC
NEW YORK Maria, former would-be nun, is about to get married.
Starring as Maria in NBC’s new version of The Sound of Music, Carrie Underwood is clad in her own Tshirt and leggings plus a wedding veil as she reverently steps through the bare-bones Manhattan rehearsal space while three dozen castmates, on their feet as if in church, sing How do you solve a problem like Maria?
Underwood’s procession ends at the “altar” (marked by a music stand) to join her groom, Capt. von Trapp, played by jeans-and-sweater-sporting Stephen Moyer.
During this preliminary runthrough a few weeks ago, much work clearly remained to get The Sound of Music Live! ready for airtime on Dec. 5, when it, along with everyone involved, will make history: More than a half-century has passed since a broadcast network has dared to mount a full-scale musical for live TV.
It would have been risky enough revisiting this Rodgers and Hammerstein classic on any terms. But this is no remake of the not-to-be-tampered-with Julie Andrews juggernaut, says Neil Meron. Meron and longtime partner Craig Zadan are the telecast’s Oscar-winning executive producers.
Instead, The Sound of Music Live! is the 1959 Broadway musical reimagined for TV, then given extra crackle with a live presentation.
Meron’s message: Everybody knows The Sound of Music, or thinks they do from the 1965 film nearly everyone has seen. But relatively few fans are acquainted with the stage original. Drawing from it, The Sound of Music Live! is meant to feel familiar, yet at the same time come across as new and different.
Consider: Moyer with castmates Laura Benanti (as Baroness Elsa Schrader) and Christian Borle (as Max Detweiler) are rehearsing a couple of weeks later a saucy song titled How Can Love Survive? This song will be brand-new to most viewers of the telecast — it was dropped from the movie.
“Plenty of nothing you haven’t got. How can love survive?” Max tunefully teases the wealthy Elsa, who, in her posh relationship with her fiancé, Capt. von Trapp, can never count theirs among “all the famous love affairs (where) lovers starve and snuggle.”
This number, sung to an instrumental track recorded by a 40-piece orchestra, takes place on the sumptuous von Trapp terrace, complete with a fountain and a panoramic view of the Alps.
‘Every day I feel like I discover new things and how to go places in acting that I didn’t think I could go.’ CARRIE UNDERWOOD Stars as Maria in Sound of Music Live!
There are still no costumes — at the moment, Borle is wearing jeans and a Batman T-shirt — but by now the entire production has redeployed to a cavernous Long Island, N.Y., sound stage.
Grumman Studios’ Stage 3, with square footage rivalling a football field’s, is now home to the terrace, along with five neighbouring sets evoking pre-Second World War Austria, including the abbey, a festival site draped with huge swastikas and the summit over which (spoiler alert) Maria, the Captain and his seven children pass to flee the Nazis at the musical’s conclusion.
It is for this soaring finish that Audra McDonald reprises Climb Ev’ry Mountain, the breathtaking anthem the Mother Abbess introduces as she sends Maria into the world and into the von Trapp household.
“In that scene, Mother Abbess is giving Maria tough love, kicking her out of the abbey,” McDonald says. “But Carrie is so moving and so sweet, my challenge is to not cry when I sing it.”
When she sings it, McDonald is fully capable of bringing to tears everyone within earshot. She is a classically trained soprano, a Tony and Grammy-winning singer and stage actress who, for good measure, appeared for four seasons on ABC’s Private Practice.
Though best known as a vampire on HBO’s True Blood, Moyer, too, is a theatre veteran. Last summer he returned to what he calls his first love, the musical stage, after 18 years’ absence, for a production of Chicago at the Hollywood Bowl. Then he reported for work on The Sound of Music Live!
Borle, known to viewers from NBC’s musical drama Smash, boasts Broadway credits including Legally Blonde: The Musical and Monty Python’s Spamalot, and won a Tony for the comedy Peter and the Starcatcher.
Laura Benanti, who starred last season on NBC’s Matthew Perry comedy Go On, has appeared in the Broadway musicals Into the Woods and Nine, and scored a Tony for her role as Gypsy Rose Lee in the 2008 Broadway revival of Gypsy.
And then there’s Carrie Underwood. Despite her status as a multiplatinum country music superstar who rose to fame as the winner of American Idol in 2005, at first glance she might seem something of a wild card in the Sound of Music cast: She has never acted before.
“Carrie is one of the bravest artists we’ve ever worked with,” says Meron, who notes she arrived two weeks before the production’s sixweek rehearsal began with her lines fully memorized, to get a head start.
“Every day,” she says during a break, “I feel like I discover new things and how to go places in acting that I didn’t think I could go.”
Even if she’s a drama neophyte as she faces her Sound of Music trial by fire, Underwood, by one measure, is the cast’s old hand: No one knows live TV, and its pressures, like she does.