At a post performance lecture I attended at an Arts Festival last week, I asked a question. We saw a performance of "The Sound of Music" done in a very unfamiliar way. I asked why so many liberties were taken with the script. The presenter said that they bought the license to do the 1959 script and she added that it was very different from the movie, but she assured me that they did not take liberties with the script. And yet they clearly had added in songs from the movie and put a decidedly Woke spin on the material. I had actually performed in that musical once upon a time. I did not remember many of the tidbits they put into this production.
My understanding of permissions is that you may cut out words and snippets of songs or absorb lines into other lines if you have to delete a character (because you haven't got enough actors). But, what we saw clearly showed how determined the director was to "bring this piece into the 21st Century." In other words, they basically disregarded the historical mores in Austria just before WWII.
For example, the girl playing Maria was very "down home" and dished out a lot of hugs in her scenes of first meeting both the children and adults, even in scenes with the Mother Superior. People were more formal in public in those times and maintained proper distances especially before people in authority such as the Mother Superior and the Captain. Other actors also were very free and casual with their touching and close proximities. Unfortunately, the actress who played Maria was a darling black actress whose Southern charms didn't really fit in 1938 Austria during the Anschluss. (Not to mention the bias at the time against mixed race relations and persecutions against people of non-Aryan races.)
The Mother Superior was also a black actress. Her performance was very good until they had her perform the wedding ceremony. That would have only been done by a priest in those days! In fact, the Nazi invasion that prompted Captain von Trapp to leave Austria was pretty much downplayed, too. We didn't even get the sense of how love could have blossomed between Maria and the Captain. The pacing of the show raced along so fast clipping any hopes of providing time for the audience to savor any "beautiful moments." There just weren't any.
This production was very disappointing. The directing could have been better even with the casting choices they made. I saw another show done with members of this same company. That show suited those actors much better. It was a comic romp where they could play as sassy and casual as they wanted and it suited the characters in the script. I just wish they had played "The Sound of Music" with more respect to its time period. After all it is definitely a "period" piece.
My understanding of permissions is that you may cut out words and snippets of songs or absorb lines into other lines if you have to delete a character (because you haven't got enough actors). But, what we saw clearly showed how determined the director was to "bring this piece into the 21st Century." In other words, they basically disregarded the historical mores in Austria just before WWII.
For example, the girl playing Maria was very "down home" and dished out a lot of hugs in her scenes of first meeting both the children and adults, even in scenes with the Mother Superior. People were more formal in public in those times and maintained proper distances especially before people in authority such as the Mother Superior and the Captain. Other actors also were very free and casual with their touching and close proximities. Unfortunately, the actress who played Maria was a darling black actress whose Southern charms didn't really fit in 1938 Austria during the Anschluss. (Not to mention the bias at the time against mixed race relations and persecutions against people of non-Aryan races.)
The Mother Superior was also a black actress. Her performance was very good until they had her perform the wedding ceremony. That would have only been done by a priest in those days! In fact, the Nazi invasion that prompted Captain von Trapp to leave Austria was pretty much downplayed, too. We didn't even get the sense of how love could have blossomed between Maria and the Captain. The pacing of the show raced along so fast clipping any hopes of providing time for the audience to savor any "beautiful moments." There just weren't any.
This production was very disappointing. The directing could have been better even with the casting choices they made. I saw another show done with members of this same company. That show suited those actors much better. It was a comic romp where they could play as sassy and casual as they wanted and it suited the characters in the script. I just wish they had played "The Sound of Music" with more respect to its time period. After all it is definitely a "period" piece.
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