ALL THE VON TRAPPING WILL SET YOUR FEET TAPPING . . .
The Sound Of Music (Curve Theatre, Leicester) Verdict: The von Trapps are alive in the city of Leicester!
IT DOESN’T matter how often you see Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Austrian musical, it always seems to work its Alpine magic. Here we go again, with the von Trapps once more proving a force of nature: this time in Leicester, for Christmas.
Directed by Paul Kerryson, the production, at times, has all the spontaneity of a punctilious cuckoo clock, but it scales its musical peaks all the same.
It’s Kerryson’s swan song in charge at Leicester before handing over to the hugely talented Nikolai Foster, and he pulls out all the stops. There’s a prodigious set from designer Al Parkinson. The Abbey, the slopes of the Alps, the inside and outside of the von Trapp mansion, together with half a dozen pine trees go up and down, in and out, like a remorseless fairground organ.
All this machinery slows the pace somewhat — and yet there is no stopping the musical, which powers on regardless, laying cuteness on top of romance and intrigue. Gretel, the baby of the family, makes it impossible not to be captivated all over again. And just try to resist singing along: it can’t be done.
‘But how did they solve the problem of Maria?’ I hear you cry, with one impatient voice. Well, in Laura Pitt-Pulford they have a redoubtable postulant nun, more like a young Maggie Smith than Julie Andrews, struggling tunefully with her conscience over whether to follow the inscrutable von Trapp.
Michael French has been commandeered from EastEnders to play the upright Austrian Captain. He cuts a rather middleaged, comfortable figure for the feisty Maria and seems better suited to Emma Clifford as his fiancee — so charming that even the children seem to like her. It could’ve all been so different!
And as for those children, they are once more the heart and soul of this most tireless of musicals.