How do You Solve a Problem Like Maria Critics?

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

How do You Solve a Problem like Maria Critics?

Last week Carrie Underwood was told, over and over, that she isn’t John Wayne. Or was it someone else she was told she’s not?

NBC and the legal entity that holds the rights to the literary estates of Rodgers and Hammerstein recently staged and televised a live production of The Sound of Music. There is nothing surprising in this; TSOM was a big Broadway production fifty years ago, and continues to be a popular show performed by professionals and amateurs.

Most people, though, know the songs and story through the 1965 film version starring Julie Andrews, who isn’t Mary Martin, the first not-really-Maria. And for the devout faithful, the film is forever ossified as the only production of The Sound of Music there ever was, that there was no TSOM before and by all that’s holy in blue hair rinse there shall never be another.

Carrie Underwood is indeed not Julie Andrews (both of them probably know that), and Julie Andrews is not Mary Martin, and Mary Martin is not the real Maria, just as (we’re being almost algebraic here) Jude Law is not Kenneth Branagh, and Kenneth Branagh is not Laurence Olivier, and Laurence Olivier is not the real Henry V.

For those who live in a never-neverland where it is forever 1965, the cry is “Sede vacantes!” They want their Maria mummified and locked away in an emotional crypt. Their doomsday rule is that a cute Anglican girl from England is the sole anointed one to sing the role of a cute Catholic girl from Austria, and that a cute Baptist girl from Oklahoma is verboten.

Happily, Maria Von Trapp, Rodgers and Hammerstein, their heirs, and their successors have never seen it that way. People involved with the various productions have not always agreed with details, but none of ‘em wants to turn off the gold that flows from them thar hills in Austria. The yodeling will continue, and many young women will don Maria’s Dirndlgewand and sing about larks and hills while dancing on stages in New York and Peoria and at local high schools for a long, long time to come.

The first Maria, the real one, famously got on very well with the third Maria, Julie Andrews, who in her turn gave her imprimatur and nihil obstat to Carrie Underwood. And y’know, if Julie Andrews says you can sing, well, you can take that to the bank in dollars, euros, or do-re-mi.

In the event, Carrie Underwood was smashing. For three hours, live, with no possibility of re-takes, she was Maria, singing, dancing, and acting among the stage hills and the stage chateau and through numerous set, lighting, and costume changes. Her voice is indeed a little bit country, but then she is a country girl, as was the original Maria.

Not all the cast were as well chosen – what’s with the almost middle-aged Rolfe in those silly shorts? – but Mother Abbess and Baroness Schroeder are outstanding. Audra McDonald (Mother Abbess) studied at Juilliard and has a lengthy resume’ of solid accomplishments on stage and on the Orwellian telescreen. She projects wisdom and benevolence with great skill. Laura Benanti (Baroness) vamps, flirts, and slithers through her role as a predator, clearly enjoying herself immensely. McDonald and Benanti’s classically trained voices are a perfect counterpoint to Carrie Underwoods’ Great Plains voice, all of them making a series of delightful songs all the better.

Stage sets are usually minimalist because of the limitations of space and the desire to focus on characterization and plot. The producers of TSOM 13 took a chance and built a series of realistic and connecting sets that really challenged the actors’ blocking and the cameras’ movements, and made it work. The miniature hillside does look stagey -- because it’s a stage – but the scenes set in the solar or garden room of Von Trapp’s mansion are redolent of Maxfield Parrish, especially in the use of gold and blue in the lighting. These scenes of a dreamy, Pre-Raphaelite world contrast with the menacing progressivism of the Nazis.

This contrast is fulfilled in the festival scene with intrusive technology, such as the microphone, and the series of huge swastika hangings in primary colors almost overwhelming the Von Trapp family in subdued clothing as they sing truth to power. Earlier in the play Max Dettweiler repeatedly urged the family to move with the times, to adapt, to compromise, and now with the usurpation of state power by National Socialism they are commanded to. Singing “Edelweiss” with its images of nature and innocence is their act of defiance.

Carrie and company gave us a great production, and the old grouches in the balcony don’t possess a veto over excellence. The irony is that in a generation or so when a new group makes a new film or Orwellian telescreen, perhaps The Sound of Music 2063, critics then will fault the new Maria for not being Carrie Underwood.

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