Clocking in at just over three hours, the Heritage Theatre Festival’s season-opening production of The Sound of Music is a full night of musical theater. Blessedly, it is also a fully satisfying evening out. Let me say right now that if American musical theater—the kind of showy show where people break into song to move the action along and forge relationships, the kind of show where hummability is a virtue, the kind of show where characters are types more than individuals and where the human spirit will always triumph, in other words the kind of spectacle epitomized by the work of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II—is not your thing, then this is not your summer pick. But if your heart warms to poised, tuneful performers and a pitch-perfect ensemble of child actors, and if disaster fatigue compels you to find some reason to be happy for a few hours, for Chrissakes, then you’re in for a treat with The Sound of Music.
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Do, Re, Mi…the whole gang’s here! A crack cast of kids distinguishes the Heritage Theatre Festival’s opening show, directed by the fest’s artistic director Robert Chapel. |
Director Robert Chapel, a 23-year veteran of UVA’s summer theater festival, nails it. There may be no director in the region who can mount a musical with more precision. Set changes go off without a hitch and quickly, the orchestra sways and ebbs flawlessly behind the singers, actors hit their marks, and the three-walled world up on stage pulses with novelty and talent. Foremost among Chapel’s achievements however is his work with the seven children who play the motherless von Trapp children. Their need for a governess is the happy accident that brings a singing would-be nun, Maria, into their home, whereupon, after freeing them from the militaristic rituals of their cold, broken-hearted father and introducing them to, yes, the sound of music, she falls for the Captain himself, becomes the Baroness and helps the family flee from the Nazis. Whew!
The show would sink if the kids were not convincing as siblings, not to mention if their transformation from cowed but secretively bratty children into a playful, happy family went unrealized. But the young ensemble delivers. Most lovely is their relationship to Maria, winningly portrayed by Emily Rice.
She leads a very strong cast that also includes a healthy serving of Charlottesville’s best talents. Among these is Lydia Horan as the Mother Abbess (her rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” had the woman next to me on opening night reaching for the tissues); Michael Volpendesta as the officious butler Franz; Daria Okugawa, whose impeccable line readings and comic timing as the von Trapps’ housekeeper should be studied by every theater MFA candidate; and the irrepressible Doug Schneider as the Nazi demi-sympathizer Max. Lance Ashmore’s Captain von Trapp convincingly softens through the course of the story and his baritone ain’t too shabby, either!
And those were just a few of my favorite things.