Priya Narine (centre) in The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Sound of Music, now delighting audiences at the Citadel, is at the top of a tiny list of resistance-is-futile musicals whose mere titles dig into the tune retention part of the brain and won’t let go.

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“My heart wants to sing every song it hears,” as Maria’s title song has it. “I know I will hear what I’ve heard before….” Exactly.

The 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, the final collaboration of the most successful musical theatre partnership in history, has an oddball history, to be sure. The story is based on the autobiography of Maria Von Trapp, and the producers originally (what were they thinking?) were keen to include only music that the Von Trapps actually sang in their concerts, with just one song by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The latter pair nixed that, needless to say, and the world continues to sing along.    

Even hardcore cynics who habitually seek out irony in song lyrics are helpless in the face of the glorious score, and The Sound of Music’s distinctive combination of inspirational nuns, adorable kids, a love story, Nazis, and Alps. And to this unique mix has been added the vocal and physical flourishes of the signature 1965 Julie Andrews film that’s indelibly imprinted, right down to the arm gestures, on the collective consciousness.

The Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production directed by Rachel Peake, now the artistic director of the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., is on a lavish scale: a cast of two dozen including alternating casts of Von Trapp kids, and an excellent band of 12. It doesn’t shirk the cultural duty to weave allusions to the movie throughout, in tableaux on the serviceable multi-framed set designed by Lorenzo Savoini, with evocative dawn and dusk lighting by Larry Isacoff and Even Gilchrist. But it’s smartly playful about reanimating the epic storytelling for the stage.

The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

After the nuns singing devotionals in the abbey (shimmery sound design by Emily C. Porter), we meet the wayward, free-spirited postulant Maria (Priya Narine) who enters the musical from among us, descending towards the Shoctor stage, down a mountain or two, singing “the hills are alive.” Indeed, yes we are. And whenever anyone refers to the mountains, they look out at … us, in all our stand-in alpine glory. This is not a production that conjures Alps with projections or cutouts.

You know the story, set in Austria on the eve of the Anschluss in 1938. High-spirited novitiate gets booted from the abbey to be governess to the seven children of a stern naval war hero widower (Charlie Gallant) who’s a steel-ribbed Austrian nationalist. He’s got principles, yes, but he’s so nutbar tyrannical on the domestic front that he’s even forbidden music in the household (in a musical! good luck with that). And he blows a whistle, military-stye, to have the children line up for inspection.

The movement score by choreographer Ainsley Hillyard is responsive to the music, supple and flexible for nun and kid alike, never too studied.

Maria’s inherent exuberance (and musical inclinations) win over the children first, and then melts the frozen heart of the Captain. And, long story short, the kids get their dad back, and a vivacious new mother. And they form a family singing group with a kooky act that will stand them in good stead later in the plot.

The Sound of Music (Priya Narine with guitar), Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

From the start every producer of The Sound of Music has to solve a problem like Maria. And Narine (whom Freewill Shakespeare audiences saw as Isabella in Measure For Measure) is a captivating Maria, with a bright impulsive charm and comic energy about her. It’s not a performance particularly strong of voice, but it is spirited in delivery. Maria’s scenes with the children are winners. Not least because the kid actors (the Whiskers corps the night I saw the show, including Elowyn Temme, Penelope Carew, Halle Leschert, Elizabeth Shakeshaft, Ben Hill, Pierce Briggs) are terrific and touching, and deliver individualized characters under Peake’s direction.

As Liesl, the eldest of the Von Trapp kids, Christina Nguyen captures all the hopeful nervous grace of “sixteen going on seventeen.” It’s a lovely version of that song, one of the musical’s most tuneful — the number she shares with Rolf (Jesse Drwiega), the boy who will break her heart by being fatefully seduced by Third Reich upward mobility.

Priya Narine and Charlie Gallant in The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

As for Captain Von Trapp, the role occupied grudgingly (according to his memoir) in the film by Christopher Plummer, Charlie Gallant’s performance doesn’t exactly bristle with charisma, or set forth in early scenes a portrait of a dauntingly stern disciplinarian whose formidable defences will be gradually worn down in the course of the musical. As is often the case in productions of The Sound of Music, the Captain is a little bland, in short. He arrives at romance, if not chemistry, and committed fatherhood in the end — and he really lands Edelweiss, his emotional solo number near the end. But it sells a little short the discovery of a self he had long suppressed, the infrastructure of the storytelling.

Kristi Hansen and Charlie Gallant in The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Kristi Hansen is an exceptional Elsa, Von Trapp’s wealthy, entitled fiancée, who sails onto the stage in a slither of satin (costumes: Jessica Oostergo) and noblesse oblige. And her numbers with the amusing impresario and born compromiser Max (the excellent Kevin Klassen), both songs that didn’t make it into the film — No Way To Stop It and How Can Love Survive?, the one a political shrug and the other a tease — are sung with wry pizzaz.

And as the Mother Abbess, Lara Ciekiewicz, who’s from the world of opera, has stage presence for days and rocks the rafters with her big voice in her big number. When she sings Climb Ev’ry Mountain, she’s not kidding: the Von Trapps take her advice, get backpacks, and walk to Switzerland.

The family exit from Austria, cleverly stage-managed by Maria (and by Peake), will lift your heart. And so will a musical that’s all about … music. Here’s a full-bodied production that gives you the welcome chance to renew your bond with one of the most loved musical scores in the canon.

REVIEW

The Sound of Music

Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Written by: Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics), Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse (book)

Directed by: Rachel Peake

Starring: Priya Narine, Charlie Gallant

Where: Citadel Shoctor Theatre

Running: through March 31

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com