Striking the right chord
‘Sound of Music’ sounds terrific, with vocally exceptional cast
How do you solve a problem like Maria, who can seem frozen in time and too good to be true?
In the stupendous touring production of “The Sound of Music” — at the Marcus Center through Sunday and simply not to be missed — director Jack O’Brien answers that question by allowing Maria to be her naïve, awkward and infectiously enthusiastic self, in a production where the music not only sounds terrific, but is also urgent and relevant to the here and now.
Making her tour debut, 23year-old Charlotte Maltby is every bit as good as predecessor Kerstin Anderson, whom I saw when this tour visited Madison last year. Maltby holds her own in this vocally exceptional cast, supported by an excellent 16-piece orchestra.
Equally important, Maltby’s Maria is also persuasively gangly and geeky before awakening to the reality that she’s no longer the “girl” the Mother Abbess first sees, but a woman.
And what an awakening it is. This is the most sexual “Sound of Music” I’ve ever seen, from a steamier version of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” between Rolf (Austin Colby) and Liesl (Paige Silvester) to the magnetic attraction between the Captain and Maria, which draws them together long before their ravishing version of the Laendler gets them called out as lovebirds by Brigitta.
It takes two to pull off the passionate dance that takes us from where these two begin to their eventual marriage. Ben Davis does his share as a Captain whose ostensibly stern demeanor is a poor disguise for the emotional, vulnerable, lonely and sometimes uncertain man behind the facade.
Even the Captain’s children — often presented as overly adorable, cloyingly cute munchkins — come across here as flesh-and-blood beings, actively choosing to sing Maria’s song and only gradually learning its cadence and choreography.
In this “Sound of Music,” it’s clear from the beginning that no choices are preordained. Even the Mother Abbess — embodied by a wonderful Melody Betts — comes across from the very beginning as a woman who might well have chosen differently, walking a path akin to the one that will ultimately take Maria away from the Abbey.
And from Austria. Among the most important choices in “The Sound of Music” are those that many characters must make regarding the Anschluss yoking Austria to Hitler’s Germany.
As Elsa and Max, Teri Hansen and Merwin Foard choose appeasement; Foard’s Max is dangerously charming and funny as well as selfish in stating the case.
But O’Brien gives us the Nazi alternative in all its ugly demagogy, making it easy to root for the Captain as Davis sings the most stirring version of “Edelweiss” I’ve heard in a long time. Plaintive and anguished, it’s never felt more relevant, urging the audience to whom it’s sung — in 1938 and 2017 — to hear and heed the music of the heart.