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Von Trapps soar up the mountain
Musical: The sound of music
London Palladium
NAZIS, mountains, kids and nuns. Everybody knows this landmark of musical theatre, the magnum opus of the extraordinary Rodgers and Hammerstein that, until Saturday Night Fever, was the highest-selling soundtrack of all time.
It started off as a Broadway show but how does anyone begin to break the inimitable mould set by Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in the 1965 film?
It’s difficult but this cast manage it. Connie Fisher – whose a-star-is-born headlines I have not seen since Elaine Paige in Evita – won a television reality show for the part of Maria Rainer, the nutty nun who falls in love with an Austrian army captain and becomes Baroness Von Trapp raising his seven motherless children along the way.
However Fisher had had many years of drama training behind her ‘overnight’ success and, in fact, it shows.
She is a talented actress with one of the sweetest voices I’ve heard on stage in years.
Unfortunately she is cast against the amazing Lesley Garrett, who, while playing the Mother Abbess like one of Victoria Wood’s northern Dinnerladies, has a remarkable stage voice.
The sound of her singing Climb Ev’ry Mountain is as stirring as it is moving. Her voice is so splendid that it dwarfs that of her co-stars and makes her acting all the more unfortunate.
Alexander Hanson, brought in at the last minute after Simon Shepherd was ‘withdrawn’ from the role, is a stiff-backed, rather characterless Von Trapp initially.
He gets better as the show progresses but is still somewhat of a caricature by the end. (Plummer casts a long, but more charmingly handsome, shadow in this regard.)
The children are very good. Sophie Bould’s Liesl is rather pinch-faced, but I ended up smiling involuntarily at Adrianna Bertola’s gorgeously cute Gretl.
Ian Gelder’s incorrigible Max Detweiler is a cross between the bluff and bluster of a Jeffrey Archer and Rex Harrison but his portrayal is lively and tuneful.
With vital exciting orchestration this was really a very good production indeed.
The scenery, incidentally, is in places quite breathtaking (watch how they reproduce the soaring Austrian mountains, the opulence of Von Trapp’s palatial home then the abbey – superb).
Throroughly recommended, but be warned: it lasts longer than two hours with an interval and is a long haul for younger children.
Until April 2007
click here to book or call CNJ booking line: 0870 040 0070 |
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