Review: The Sound of Music at Leeds Grand Theatre

“…beautiful, warm-hearted story of unexpected love and sacrifice…”

The Sound of Music by Opera North, Leeds Grand Theatre

By Sean Sable
In the ancient bygone days of the 1980s, watching a movie at home was dark magic. You were either subject to the whims of the terrestrial TV programming schedule, or, if you were lucky, your parents clubbed in with the neighbours to buy a newfangled device called a VCR. Then you had the wild and heady luxury of watching one of the five tapes you owned. I was fortunate enough to be in the latter camp, and every fourth week of the month, it was my family’s turn with the VCR. Inevitably, we all clamoured to watch our favourite movies (as long as they were one of the five tapes we owned). My mum’s favourite movie was The Sound of Music. So, in a nearly monthly ritual, we would watch Sister Maria twirl on the Austrian Alps, sitting under blankets that we pulled around our faces like habits. Eventually, when I was a teenager, the tape snapped from overuse and, from that moment, I have probably only seen the film a handful of times. I’ve never stopped loving Maria and the von Trapp family children, but the story has always been so ingrained in my memory that I only need to think about it, and I am watching it frame by frame. So, when Opera North announced its summertime production of The Sound of Music, I already had my guitar packed and began cutting my favourite curtains into lederhosen.

As far as I can find, The Sound of Music is new material for Opera North, though musicals certainly aren’t new territory, with previous seasons offering favourite classics such as Sweeney Todd and My Fair Lady. This production is essentially a transfer of Nikolai Foster’s Christmas production for Leicester Curve, arriving with most of its creative team intact: Michael Taylor’s set and costumes, Mark Henderson’s lighting and Ebony Molina’s choreography, now conducted by Oliver Rundell with the Chorus and Orchestra of Opera North themselves.

Based on Maria von Trapp’s memoir, by way of a German film adaptation, The Sound of Music is the story of Maria, a postulant too vibrant and restless for convent life. Under the guidance of the older nuns in her order, she is packed off to govern the seven children of a widowed Austrian naval captain who runs his household like one of his ships. As Maria attempts to follow God’s will—that she help the children learn to love the woman everyone believes will become their new mother—music creeps back into a home that had shut it out. Refusing the rigidity of Captain von Trapp, the children learn through lessons and games as a slow, yearning affection develops between Maria and the Captain. But Austria is a precarious place to be as the Nazi annexation of the country interrupts their love story and the threat of stormtroopers forces the family to make some difficult decisions.

The curtain rises on nuns singing in candlelit dark before dissolving into a fresh approach to Maria’s Alps. Gone are the expansive meadows of luminous green. Instead, we are given a more earthy and naturalistic vision: a permanent rock face and worn stone steps, a smoke-rendered waterfall, bare winter trees and a painted range receding behind it all. There is no wide green hilltop to twirl across, which caught me off guard, but over time I warmed to the creative choice, which allowed for a more real and lasting vision of what it was like to live at the edge of the mountains. Acting as a kind of permanent vista, the rock face, steps and mountain range stay in place throughout the performance. As scenes change, smaller set pieces, tucked into those same woods, are moved on and off the stage. For the abbey, we get an oversized Gothic window that casts an imposing shadow. For the von Trapp house, we are given two soaring arched windows and a rotating staircase that orients us to different aspects of the house as it shifts from scene to scene. One of my favourite features was watching the actors walk up and down the stairs even as the set piece was being rolled in and out, giving it a sense of perpetual motion.

Mark Henderson’s skilful lighting does what the best lighting design does: focuses not just on what is lit, but what remains unlit. It is about layering, shadows and silhouettes, not simple coloured washes and the occasional spot. Even when he does incorporate colour, it’s done with real skill, giving a rainbow-like palette to the Austrian sunset that feels ethereal and instantly nostalgic. When the children run to Maria in the thunderstorm, light and sound work together rather convincingly, creating a cosy rainy-night atmosphere that pushes the family closer together. Later, when the von Trapp family is fleeing the Nazis through the abbey gardens, the stage is lit almost exclusively by torches and candles. The sight of the family huddling in candlelight as a torch beam searches the audience gives the scene a real sense of danger.

Of course, you are never going to go to an Opera North production and complain that the music was shabby, but I was genuinely charmed by Katie Bird’s Maria. Julie Andrews provides Goliath-sized shoes to fill, and I was sincerely impressed to find that I spent zero minutes comparing the two performances as I watched. Katie Bird crafted her own version of Maria, one that never needed to compete. Her voice is arresting: warmer and perhaps fuller than Julie Andrews’ and a little less twittering up top—it feels like a warm hug. Edward Bennett’s Georg had plenty to compete with as my favourite film moment happens when Christopher Plummer sings “Edelweiss” in an act of unparalleled wooing that every girl hopes she will someday be on the receiving end of. Christopher Plummer’s blue eyes… le sigh. What were we saying again? Oh yes, Edward Bennett was a worthy match to my memories, and his own version of the iconic song was worth the painstaking final-act wait.

I’m going to admit now that I spent a good chunk of my childhood fast-forwarding through “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”. I found the song in the film boring and shrill and a little uncomfortably matronly. For a seven-year-old, it was a real snooze. But what it was missing, apparently, was Katherine Broderick’s Mother Abbess. Warmer, friendlier and more human, her rendition of the song made it an instant new favourite for me. In fact, the overall portrayal of the nuns was far more lovable than in most other productions, and I think it filled in a little gap in the story. In the film version, Maria being sent away from the abbey can feel like the somewhat austere rejection of a light-hearted soul by a one-dimensional wall of habits. In this production, we see it as the loving guidance of maternal figures who know what’s best.

The Sound of Music would be nothing without the von Trapp children. Last night’s performances (team drop) were simply a joy: unhammy, properly kid-like, scrambling over furniture during the thunderstorm scene and hanging from the curtains like the Lost Boys on parade. When Zac Anders, playing Friedrich, nailed his high note in “So Long, Farewell”, half the audience broke into spontaneous applause before the number had even finished.

I want to say it was all perfect, but I do have some minor niggles with the casting of Rolf. Don’t get me wrong, Kamil Bien has a lovely voice—I could listen to him sing a grocery list. But the casting contrast made him read noticeably older against a very convincingly teenage-looking Liesl, which took some of the youthful awkwardness out of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”. As a result, there was less chemistry than I expected from their foil-like love story. There is a touching moment towards the end, when the Nazis are searching for the von Trapp family, and the acting in that scene was fabulous, but I just can’t move away from the disconnect I felt in their earlier romantic scenes.

At the end of the night, the Orchestra of Opera North, under the direction of Oliver Rundell, was given a well-earned standing ovation. I’d have happily sat through the evening as a concert with no staging at all—they are always just that good.

There is a lot to enjoy about the original stage musical, even for the most ardent film lover. In the film, the Nazi subplot feels almost tacked on, and as a child I remember finding the behaviour so unmotivated at times that I was confused about why people behaved as they did. This desire to move the more political plot points to the side actually weakens the film in comparison to its stage counterpart, where the threat feels much more visceral. Elsa’s exit in the film always read to me as a graceful, romantic bowing-out of their engagement, which resonated emotionally but felt, even to a child, like very thin reasoning. It was much more interesting to watch how political differences drove a wedge between Georg and his social circle, which must have been far more wounding than simply being romantically thwarted.

The Sound of Music by Opera North is a beautiful, warm-hearted story of unexpected love and sacrifice that has only got better with age. Whether you can recite “Do-Re-Mi” in your sleep or you’re meeting the von Trapps for the first time, this is a hillside worth climbing.

The Sound of Music plays at Leeds Grand Theatre until Saturday 01 August. Tickets are available here.

Sean Sable is a Yorkshire-based freelance writer and editor specialising in Young Adult and Horror fiction, frequently at the same time. When she isn’t buried under a pile of books and manuscripts, she is looking for her keys and having extensive one-sided conversations, in Swedish, with her deaf cat. You can find her online at: www.seansable.co.uk