With the decades-long, steady stream of holiday airings of the Julie Andrews-powered movie version of “The Sound of Music,”you may well think you’ve already utterly cracked the crowd-pleasing family favorite.
The 1959 Broadway musical version, based on the 1965 American musical drama film, launches Charleston Stage’s 2025-26 season in a beguiling production directed by Marybeth Clark at the Dock Street Theatre.
Inspired by a true story, the musical is the work of composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, with a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Both dramatized versions center on the ostensible problem of an Austrian nun-in-training named Maria, as she assumes her reluctant role as nanny to the seven motherless, mischievous von Trapp children.
So this is not the movie, per se, but, moreover, it is not the moment when many of us first encountered it. Then, the notion of an Austria so menaced by occupying Nazis that it compelled Captain Georg von Trapp to flee seemed a terrible chapter wholly relegated to darker days behind us, rather than to come.
Gorgeous local performance
“The Sound of Music” is absolutely engaging and affecting in Charleston Stage’s gorgeously performed new production. What’s more, given the current world order, its driving truths loom anew and with added agency.
Sure, you’ll perk up to captivating vocal stylings of beloved numbers that many of us know word for word–the cheering, charming “My Favorite Things” with its raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, the “Do-Re-Mi,” that figured into many an early musical education, the rousing pronouncement that the hills are alive with the sound of music–and that, according to a certain mother superior, every one of them should be climbed.
The performers, who are accompanied by an 11-piece live orchestra led by music director/conductor Michael Lopez, enfold you in the comfort of nostalgia as if it were a well-loved family quilt.
If you have seen the movie many times, you’ll note some that are in a different sequence. Some aren’t accounted for, and others are present that had landed on the cutting-room floor, particularly those spotlighting Georg’s presumptive marriage to Elsa Schrader (Kerri Roberts), and her kinship with her partner-in-socializing, Uncle Max (Julian Blake Gordon).
This all plays out on a welcoming set, designed by Juian Wiles with brightly painted backdrops and panels–from its opening convent that gives way to Maria idling on a bridge with the Alps to the proud yellow manse the von Trapps call home.
Movie devotees will more than get their fix from the Broadway show, thanks in particular to wide-eyed, winsome Maria, as portrayed with heart, esprit, gumption and glorious vocals by Abby Vernon. Those were close to heaven as the Alps can get you, no easy matter for songs with such a hold on our collective memory. She finds ballast in her military-minded counterpart and love interest Georg, as portrayed in a measured rendition by Lee Lewis.
In a recent performance, Vernon was only occasionally upstaged by 5-year-old Eva Davis as Gretl, the youngest von Trapp. The production alternates the youth performers, so I also enjoyed spirited performances that evening by Rafaella Connolly as Louisa, Connor Collette as Kurt, Evelyn Ahlert as Brigitta and Vivian Coppel as Marta.
Throughout the run, Kelsey Engen is a sweet-piped, effervescent Liesl, well-matched by the macho-wannabe of Max Mast in the role of her 17-going-on-18-year-old Nazi youth paramour Franz. As Friedrich, Harry Baxley nailed the role, and his hallmark high note, too.
Clocking in at two and half hours, not counting intermission, the musical goes the distance. Even though most were well aware of the show’s narrative arc, it succeeds in striking a suitably ominous chord near the end. When two red banners with large swastikas flank the family, we can only stare helplessly from our seats as soldiers storm the stage.
Amid dulcet sounds and sentiments of those aforementioned raindrops on roses, it’s hard not to question whether we, like the von Trapps, could climb every mountain in the face of such force. That’s driven home when the captain, throat catching with emotions, sings “Edelweiss” to his audience and us, the score’s number that became a patriotic song in Austria.
As the captain struggles under the weight of his threatened homeland with aggression advancing toward him, my throat caught for my homeland, too.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Performances run through September 28 at the Dock Street Theatre, 135 Church St. Ticket prices range from $53.25 to $102.25. More: charlestonstage.com.
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