These Are a Few of My Favourite Musicals...

I think I was about seventeen or eighteen when I first sat through an entire viewing of The Sound of Music. I had heard the excessively sanguine songs before, but to view the three-hour film was another story. (Like most of my adolescence, I was always about ten years behind everyone else.) Even though I have a cold, cold heart, a part of me melted that day and I couldn’t help but fall in love, just a little, with the incredibly blonde, Village of the Damned-evocative Von Trapp family.

Although I knew the film well, what I didn’t know was that the wildly successful movie about a perfect-pitch singing family was originally a wildly successful Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that finally has its run in Toronto. With the mostly Canadian cast, The Sound of Music had its debut at the Princess of Wales Theatre on October 3. What made this production additionally interesting was that Elicia Mackenzie, winner of the reality show “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?,” was also making her big stage debut.

I was apprehensive about sitting through a musical that featured a reality show winner in such a prominent role, but Mackenzie was seemingly born to play Maria. From the beginning, she brought an energy and doe-eyedness to the stage that did little to hide her greenness. At twenty-three, Mackenzie is just embarking on her career, although she already sings like a professional.

On stage, Mackenzie is vibrant and charming, playing Maria with an earnest awkwardness made so famous all those years ago by Julie Andrews. She glides effortlessly through each scene, by far the best vocalist on stage (next to seasoned veteran Noëlla Huet, who plays Mother Abbess).

Likewise, the six hundred and forty-seven Von Trapp children, here played by young children, are adorable to an almost overwhelmingly extent, and tackle their roles like nobody’s business. I have to give kudos to these child actors; from the ages of five to ten, all I was doing was picking my nose and playing MASH, and they’re up on stage singing to hundreds of people every night. Of note is Megan Nuttall, who plays the eldest child Eliza Liesl (thanks Elisabeth!). Though Nuttall looks both older and bigger than her governess, Mackenzie, she still brings a certain vulnerability to her role, a rarity to find in a stock secondary character.

That said, the chemistry between the leads is less than stellar. Burke Moses, who plays Captain Georg Von Trapp, comes across as a burly man with little to no emotion. When he’s sad, he looks angry. When he’s happy, he looks angry. When he’s angry, he looks angry. And so on. He’s almost as bad as Keanu Reeves, were it not for the singing. Paired with Mackenzie, who, in contrast, is a ball of energy and smiles, the mutual attraction doesn’t come across convincingly…or at all.

The stage adaptation takes liberties with setting and musical numbers to accommodate stage direction, setting, and time, but many will be glad to hear that favourites like “A Few of My Favorite Things,” "The Sound of Music," "Do-Re-Mi," "Sixteen Going On Seventeen," and "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" are still intact and unchanged after all these years (my personal favourite, “The Lonely Goadherd,” was but a nary footnote in the whole production, essentially replacing “A Few of My Favorite Things” in the thunderstorm/bedroom scene). But fret not, because as an added bonus, there are a couple of numbers that don’t appear in the film.

The Sound of Music is a great musical in itself, but the pièce de résistance is the set design. Carefully crafted and flowing seamlessly, it almost overshadows the play itself. The mountain set, rigged to move up and down to create a sense of depth, is breathtaking. In fact, each set change flows so well that it almost goes unnoticed. The set design deserves as much regard as the performers.

I’m not a musical connoisseur by any means, but I do believe that a classic deserves some justice. And with this rendition of The Sound of Music, justice has been served.

The Sound of Music will be playing at the The Princess of Wales Theatre through to January 11, 2009.

Christine