It's iconic...it truly is. The Sound of Music is such a standard in musicals...in soundtracks...in movies. Our family alone has probably seen it like a million times. So when we saw that it was being performed by Boulder Dinner Theater, we knew we had to see it. Neither Kristie or I had seen the show performed live, but I had read the script some time in the past. I knew that some of the sequencing was different than the movie and had a few different songs (and a couple were added for the movie to boot...) so while it would be familiar, it at least wouldn't be just a rehash of the movie, or so I hoped.
They didn't let us down. This was our second time at BDT (last summer's Music Man performance was documented and subsequently lost in the great blog meltdown...) and it remains a highlight. The food: decent, if not entirely forgettable. We settled as a family on 2 beef stroganoffs and 2 chicken corden bleu. Neither was bad, nor was it particularly terrific. I guess it simply could be a lot worse and for dinner theater, that's a pretty good mark. We sat on the far stage right, up on the highest level (backs to the wall). The size of the room is so nice that these weren't bad seats, you just had to accept your vantage point. To be fair to the production, they did a pretty good job of using their thrust so nothing was particularly obscured. We did get to sneak a peak at them moving their scenery backstage, that was kind of cool for us geeks.
BDT knows how to do musicals. Their sound is great. They've got a nice orchestra upstairs that puts out a lot of sound. Don't think they're using a formal synthesizer (like the Symfonia) but I'm certain that they've got something going like it. The vocal mics seemed a little scratchy and submerged (I notice these things) and I seem to remember how clear things were last year. Don't know if it was where we were sitting or how they had them applied but it wasn't quite as good as it could be. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had plain old lav mics taped to the sides of the actors cheeks, in some cases up closer to the temple but on others it was down nearer the mouth. A mild form of vindication for the hassle I went through during the Music Man I suppose. Last year, their Harold Hill character had his mic latexed to his face, but no one did that this year. Perhaps it was so they didn't have to wear their mics during dinner (our waiter was the Captain himself!) One last comment on the sound was that they even missed a couple of the cues, so the mics were muted for a second while the actors were speaking their lines. OK, so maybe I'm a little critical of that too!
Staging was cool, they had a multisided, multilevel house/abbey with a practical stairway and french doors. During set changes they weren't particularily quiet and we could all hear them rolling the pieces around. They even did one live move where the actor walked in front of the set piece while the hands moved it, all while the scene was going on. I always say that my ideas are not necessarily my own, as I probably read about that sometime in the past.
The actors: superb. All good singers and actors naturally. John Scott Clough portrayed the Captain completely appropriately. He was my favorite from the Music Man last year with his portrayal of Charlie Cowell. I even complimented him on that performance during dinner. I'm sure he thought I was a stalker or something! Christianna Sullins was lovely and talented as Maria, and the show was stolen (appropriately) by A.K. Klimpke as Uncle Max. The rest of the characters were solidly performed by some familiar BDT faces (Harold Hill as a Nazi?) The children were very well directed and talented. The bookends of the oldest daughter and the youngest were the highlights as the Liesl character sang fantastic (she was played by 2 actresses and I'm not certain which one we had) and the Gretl was cute beyond words.
About the only slight negative that you'd be able to extract from me would be the overall pace of the story. The stage play has a different vibe and feel than the movie. The love story doesn't really evolve, it just happens. The big Nazi finale from the movie is kind of a throw away on the stage. When the kids are scared in the thunderstorm they sing Lonely Goatherd to comfort them...the movie has that one right...it really should be Favorite Things...which is sung as a duet with Mother and Maria at the opening. They did a particularily inspiring job on the wedding, starting the actors kneeling center stage behind the scrim. Very effective. And the transition from his villa to the concert was very nice with the black curtain "becoming" the dark performance stage, light harshly by the followspots.
They avoided a trap successfully in that they didn't just copy the movie, in the staging and even the pacing of the songs. It would be easy to just mail in the well known versions of the big songs, but instead they made them their own (a grossly over-used term) and that was especially enjoyable.
I'm hoping that we follow up with our desire to see their next production, MID-LIFE: The Crisis Musical. As I found with Light in the Piazza, it's nice to see new stuff!