Chichester has set fairly a file for staging West Finish-quality musicals in latest instances. This immaculate manufacturing isn’t any exception. Director Adam Penford doesn’t purpose for any reinvention of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s ultimate musical collaboration however creates a sophisticated gem that glories in its faithfulness.
Premiering on Broadway in 1959, the Nazi-era drama of Maria, a novitiate nun-turned-governess (Gina Beck) to the von Trapp household, remains to be a syrupy love story and relentlessly smiley narrative about overcoming adversity. However there may be an earnestness to all of it right here that actually does make for feelgood theatre.
There are additionally, importantly, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s infectious songs – is there one other musical with as many well-known numbers? They don’t seem to be solely sung gloriously by each performer however twinned with impish and imaginative choreography by Lizzi Gee, particularly within the extra playful songs akin to Do-Re-Mi, when Maria teaches the kids to sing, and The Lonely Goatherd, after they run into her room for worry of the thunder exterior. The row of kids, of their an identical costumes, are cute, their actions so rigorously choreographed all through that it looks like operetta, dance and musical theatre certain into one.
Robert Jones’s set glides easily between a cathedral gray backdrop and a palette of pastels which captures the previous Austrian grandeur of the von Trapp family and brings shades of The Nutcracker.
Beck has a stunning wide-eyed radiance and the identical haircut as Julie Andrews within the 1965 movie, and a generally uncanny resemblance. She carries all her songs commandingly, from the ecstatic strains of her first quantity onwards. She additionally has a finely tuned steadiness between mischief and sincerity – we gun for her romance with the Captain (Edward Harrison), ready for his coronary heart to soften.
Uncanny resemblance to Julie Andrews … Gina Beck as Maria. {Photograph}: Manuel Harlan
The opera singer Janis Kelly is impressed casting as Mom Abbess, with an particularly hovering rendition of Climb Ev’ry Mountain, even when her position as Maria’s adviser bears the strains of a motivational coach, talking of discovering God – and love – in tacky homilies. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s e book as an entire is unashamedly tacky. When God closes a door, he opens a door, we hear in a dialog between the Captain and Maria.
But, gritty actuality nonetheless sneaks into the story and this manufacturing brings an eerie high quality to its ultimate scenes, following the Anschluss of 1938, when Nazi officers stand within the theatre’s aisles, surrounding the von Trapps as they carry out of their singing competitors in Salzburg. “Bless my homeland eternally,” sings Harrison, in an achingly clear rendition of Edelweiss, and the tune acquires sinister strains, its harmless patriotism bearing the potential to be interpreted in a different way by the onlooking stormtroopers. The picture of this household in conventional Austrian gown may turn into a tableau of the Aryan dream on stage, within the fingers of the Third Reich that’s forcibly attempting to enlist the captain, and the playful, marching-band undertones to the music turns right into a booming martial beat.
So, a musical romance that has all of the bases lined: a row of performing kids, a posse of singing nuns, a slew of uplifting songs and a defeat for the Nazis because the von Trapps escape into the Alpine mountains. As Julie Andrews mentioned: “What extra do you want?”