Sunday 11 August 2013

Telegraph - SOM Review


There are countless glowing reviews of this wonderful production of 'The Sound of Music' at Regents Park Open Air Theatre so I'm going to be posting them fairly regularly over the next few weeks.

Next up is a 5 star review written by Charles Spencer, theatre critic for The Telegraph:


TELEGRAPH REVIEW (5*)

On holiday in Austria last year, I heard the story of one of the guides who had to dress up each day in leather shorts and a feathered hat and escort English and American tourists around the locations used in film of The Sound of Music. Apparently the punters sing all the famous songs in the coach throughout the trip, and one woman claimed to have watched the movie starring Julie Andrews twice a day, every day, for the past 20 years. She spent most of the trip sobbing with emotion, while the guide had grown to hate his job so much that only frequent furtive slurps from a flask of neat vodka kept him going. 

I must admit to being a bit of a Sound of Music fan myself, though the correct critical response is to say the show is tooth-rottingly sentimental and not a patch on such earlier Rodgers and Hammerstein classics as Oklahoma! and Carousel. 

But despite my best endeavours to despise both the show and the film, The Sound of Music always wins me over, and quite often I have to pretend that I have got something in my eye to explain the baffling tears that are running down my cheeks. 

This new production in the idyllic surroundings of Regent’s Park is the finest I have ever seen. Even on a cold damp night it generates great waves of warmth, and the sylvan setting, with Maria running over the greensward, trilling merrily, suits it perfectly. 

Rachel Kavanaugh directs the piece with exactly the right simplicity and emotional directness. There is no attempt to find a clever concept for the show, and Peter McKintosh’s design neatly conjures both the nuns’ abbey and von Trapp’s stately pile. There is even a small moat – and we know that Maria has won the Captain’s love when this pillar of rigid rectitude takes off his shoes and socks and paddles in it with her. 

Charlotte Wakefield is superb as Maria: funny, forthright and movingly vulnerable when the emotional stakes are high. Her voice has a lovely bell-like clarity, and her rapport with the child actors feels delightfully natural and spontaneous. Michael Xavier beautifully conveys the melting of Captain von Trapp’s grief-frozen heart under Maria’s benign influence and it is somehow deeply touching that the diminutive Wakefield has to stand on tiptoe to embrace him. The children are superb, with especially winning work at the performance I saw from Imogen Gurney as Brigitta, a girl emotionally wise beyond her years who recognises what is happening between Maria and her father before they do. 

Helen Hobson combines spiritual wisdom with a soaring voice in the role of the Mother Abbess and there is a winning comic performance from Michael Matus as the cynical impresario Max. The show becomes genuinely tense in the second half as darkness falls and the Nazi threat becomes ever more menacing, with armed soldiers sporting swastikas and patrolling the auditorium. 

Throughout, this wonderfully fresh and deeply felt production proves that there is much more to The Sound of Music than raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

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