Wee Background:
I utterly adore the 1965 movie and Julie Andrews has magical powers. I also was in a community theater production of the musical when I was 12. I’ve never had more costume changes before or since playing a Von Trapp child, plus the harmonies in the title song are insane. The experience likely cemented my love for the story and the music. Around that time, I also became all interested in the making of the movie and read this book, like, ten times. So I know all these weird tidbits about that process.
More Background:
I’ve been aiming to crank out this post before I read any reviews, but several that I’ve noticed via Facebook seem to think that NBC made all these horrid changes, such as omitting the goatherd puppet show. (Although at least one doubled back later when they realized their mistake.) So to clarify: Sound of Music opened on Broadway with Mary Martin in 1959 and ran for four years; the movie came out in 1965 with Julie Andrews and had a totally different script, plus new songs. The NBC broadcast? That was the original stage version, almost verbatim. Yup, I remember thinking the script was bad when I was 12. Only difference was they subbed the original “Ordinary Couple” for “Something Good,” which was a really good call.
In a nutshell, Ernest Lehman did brilliant work with the screenplay, especially with making the Captain edgier and a stronger foil for Maria. The music has always been wonderful, but those two Elsa/Max songs seem like they tumbled in from another show. So the 1965 movie team yoinked those, added “I Have Confidence,” replaced “Ordinary Couple” with “Something Good,” and then moved a whole bunch of songs around. (Fun factoid: almost everyone in the 1965 movie is dubbed or reinforced except Julie Andrews.) In any case, the cringe-inducing dialogue from the broadcast was problematic as heck. But the fact that the vastly-improved movie dialogue is engrained in our brains is not Carrie Underwood’s fault. Holy shnikes, I defended her. Moving on.
Overall:
I am tickled that NBC aired live musical theater during primetime. More please! That said, I wish that NBC had aired live musical theater during primetime. Because that wasn’t theater. It was a wacky hybrid of theater, movie musical, and soap opera. Yes, Carrie Underwood’s utter inability to emote was quite problematic, as was the inconsistent style of it all. But more than that, the fact that this event didn’t know its own genre ultimately sunk the whole project. I am glad that the ratings rocked, even though the product didn’t, so that someone will do this again and do it well.
Disclosure:
I did watch the entire thing, but not in order. I hadn’t planned to watch, but then got talked into seeing the last hour. Then I went back the next day, via DVR magic, and watched the beginning. Which has more Audra McDonald and is thus automatically better.
Performances:
I actually did not think these were the core problem. In fact, some of this casting was great. Had this been The Sound of Elsa and Max, I would have watched it on loop. (Confession: I enjoyed that live broadcast of Legally Blonde, and it’s the reason I dig Christian Borle. It’s cheesy, but … he’s really good in that show, guys!) Vocally, he was an excellent Max. He has such good control of his instrument, and he doesn’t show off unnecessarily. He was smooth, powerful, or talky, as the moment demanded. Moreover, he took a character who can be played as light comic relief, and elevated him. You’re never quite sure whether Max is opportunistic or callous, naive or conniving. His allegiance did get overly hazy at the end, but that might be the limitations of the script.
Laura Benanti also rocked my socks. I felt a wee bit bad that everyone called her the Baroness (movie change), when she clearly was a CEO. Um, the latter is obviously better. But if anyone nailed the clunky dialogue, it was this lady. Beyond that, she had a detailed sympathy for this character. She went to the trouble of understanding her, and you could see it in how she stood, how she looked at the Captain, how she walked around the fake-looking terrace. Oh, and her voice was gorgeous and it never sounded like she was even trying. So that helped. Oddly, the only other person who did a nuanced, and fun, acting job was Frau Schmidt. And I can’t even find the actor’s name! She’s a movie mystery! Silly NBC website only lists the major roles and the children, even though Frau Schmidt has way more lines than Marta. Seriously, she did a great job with a character whose entire function is exposition. Side note: what happened to Frau Schmidt once the Von Trapps made a run for it?
Oh, and Audra McDonald is made of sunshine. For real, I might not have gone back and watched the beginning if I hadn’t missed the bulk of her songs. She has this slight jazz edge to her voice, not to mention a killer vibrato, that is just addictive to my ears. That said, she (among others) had an acting-related issue: she’s first and foremost a musical theater performer, and she performed as if she were onstage. As in, she projected, she cheated out, she set up laugh lines. It was a good performance, but it didn’t make sense in this medium. Now, she certainly knows how to act on camera, so I don’t think that she messed up. I’ll get more into this later on, but someone legit dropped the ball when it came to giving the actors a clear idea of where they were and what they were doing.
I don’t want to harp on the children because they were cute and did their best. Whoever did the boys’ hair should get in wicked trouble though. Here is the real key: was Stephen Moyer or Carrie Underwood a bigger problem? Yes, she was not ready, in any conceivable universe, to carry a 3-hour musical. She said the words and she said them in order, and that was it. But her performance was so flat that it nearly turned the corner into inoffensive. Whereas Stephen Moyer can act and was trying, but never got a handle on the character. I had no idea why Maria or Elsa liked the guy. Basically, I could tune out Carrie Underwood after awhile and I couldn’t do the same with him.
Here’s a wee example: the kids are playing hyper-competitive leapfrog and come upon CEO Elsa and the Captain, who are talking about why being rich is hard. Yay, their father is home! When they run to hug him, he makes this really comical disgusted face and acts like seven small aliens have suddenly decided to poke his knees. What the heck is he doing? Does he think they’ll give him alien-cooties? These are his children. I know that he doesn’t condone obvious emotion, but he is being equally emotive in his disgust. It looked so goofy. You could just see him thinking, “Okay, the Captain doesn’t hug. Act afraid of hugs! Ahh, children and hugs! Even worse! Okay, phew, that’s done.” But … Stephen Moyer should know what he’s doing. So did the co-directors mess with him and he was madly trying to justify their dictates? But … Rob Ashford & Beth McCarthy have how many Tony and Emmy nominations between them? I am so baffled as to what happened here. Basically, the Captain mugged left and right, and his singing didn’t elevate the problematic performance. He was not, like, unfortunate-sounding. But you could just hear the tension in his jaw, and it was distracting enough that I stopped seeing him as the character.
Point being: while Carrie Underwood is taking the brunt of the negative criticism, it takes two to tango and her partner didn’t help the cause. That said, her acting is shockingly poor. Especially in the context of a $9 million production. (Fun fact: not adjusted for inflation, the 1965 movie was less expensive.) It looked like someone gave her some quick acting lessons along the lines of “look at the person to whom you are speaking” and “raise your voice when you don’t like what they say.” But left out “pick up your cues.” Honestly, while I believe that she was off-book, she performed as if in terror of misplacing a single word. Was she not given enough time to internalize the script or the character? I almost wanted to hug her. I did not want to hug Stephen Moyer because that leads to panic and paralysis. Her singing was solid, but not to the extent that it should have been. She kept doing things that implied that she hadn’t run the songs enough to know where they should sit. She would get shrill on notes that weren’t that high (for her); she would ricochet between a belt and a mix. But more unfortunate? She didn’t seem to be having fun. I looked up this live performance of “Before He Cheats” and it’s great! She has expression and energy, she plays around with the phrasing. She’s totally at ease in front of a crowd. Yet again, what happened here?
Sure, there were better casting options for both leads, including folks from a certain other NBC show, but it doesn’t make sense to criticize Carrie Underwood for not being a different person. I’m more intrigued by the uncharacteristic blandness of her performance. While I don’t know her music super well, I do sense that she could have been fine — and that circumstances (wacky NBC-ish demands, limited rehearsal time, or just plain nerves?) conspired to make that impossible.
The Medium:
Could this production have been any more confuzzled? I have no idea what the network and the directors wanted this to be — and that was a far more distracting, frustrating issue than the acting.
– Was this a movie? Don’t think so. At one point, Maria seemingly walked through an automated garage door that led from the Von Trapp Shack to the Abbey. Scenes that shouldn’t, realistically speaking, take place in a single room all got squished into the poor Captain’s vestibule. Then he had a huge party in his tiny outdoor breakfast nook. Three different scenes were all obviously filmed on the same minuscule mountain set. Franz entered instantly when summoned, despite the enormous-ness of the house. The kids “secretly” sang six inches from Frau Schmidt’s face and she somehow did not notice. The family hid behind these tiny potted plants and the Nazis didn’t see them. And the audience only saw the action from the front. None of these things are weird onstage. They were beyond bizarre in a movie context.
– Was this a stage production? Well, some of the actors were cheating out and projecting, but others weren’t. So not much consensus there. The transitions out of songs were all super awkward because they couldn’t just cut away (not a movie) and they couldn’t have a mood shift during the applause (no audience). Most of the laugh lines also flopped with, again, no one to laugh. Wee adorable Kurt gave this very expressive, perfectly stage-appropriate performance; but then the dumb camera swooped in for a close up and it looked like he was massively over-acting. My fiancée also pointed out that the abbey scenes felt mad claustrophobic. A church that is not church-sized is fine onstage. We have the whole theatre to give the illusion of space! But without a theatre, the church just felt itty-bitty.
– Was this a soap opera? Okay, obviously not. But why was was it filmed like one? I mean, this was shot at a high frame rate, right? Which typically results in the clunky videotape-feel of a soap opera or an HGTV episode. Maybe this was a cost-saving measure, but … really? It always looks cheap unless you are filming something that is meant to be seen in real time. Like, say, a musical in a theatre. Even the lighting looked cheap. In my head, some comically evil NBC exec only gave them 20 minutes to tech and the directors went crazy-town: “Ah! No time! Eek, whatever, this can be a full stage wash. We just need to be able to see everyone.” Actually, even that didn’t happen sometimes.
The Design:
It’s a small thing, but can we talk about the kids’ curtain outfits? They are on camera for a grand total of twenty seconds and they are the most overly-designed curtain costumes on the planet. Did Maria have a secret army of seamstresses under her very roomy bed? How the heck did she do that? She needed to consider a second career or something because that was mad impressive. She even got cute trim! From where? Here’s the thing: great costumes can tell us a story about the characters before anyone says a word. And these ones didn’t tell the “Maria made me in one day from curtains” story. Rather, they gave us utterly misleading information. Namely, that Maria had sewing elves under her bed and access to an awesome fabric store. These costume contradictions popped up constantly. Rolf pranced around in these goofy short pants, while Admiral Dude was wearing this thick wool coat and gloves. So … what time of year was it? The Anschluss took place in March, so maybe they have varying sensitivities to cold. I don’t know. The Captain and Brigitta also told Maria that she looked like crap when she was in a super cute dress and heels. At least Elsa had great pants.
The lighting was possessed. In the opening scene, Audra McDonald has a big shadow across her face half the time. In the same scene, we saw white light streaming through a back window, which would imply morning. One minute later, we saw the same light directly overhead. Either the world started spinning 200 times faster, or that was a massive continuity issue. Or they wanted artistic lighting here and nowhere else. When Maria and the kids scampered into the courtyard for “Do Re Mi,” it looked like blueish evening … until they got midway through and suddenly, sun! The Von Trapps also performed in a very odd theatre, where both the stage and the audience were lit in the same way. Did Max forget to hire an LD for the Salzburg Festival? That seems out of character to me. And don’t ask what was going on during “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” They might as well have been dancing and making out in a window display.
The sets were fine, but they also suffered from “film or stage” dysphoria. ‘Twas weird as heck that the Von Trapps never hung out anywhere except the entrance hall and the terrace, despite owning a ginormous estate. At least the entrance hall looked like a real environment, albeit one with a magic housekeeper, as these seven jumping-bean children never seemed to track dirt. But the theatre at the end looked nothing like a fully-realized concert hall. It looked like a rough suggestion of one. Now in a stage musical, you can indicate a space through a few strategically-placed items. That’s fine. But you can’t suddenly start doing that in a film and expect the audience not to be confuzzled. Also, what was up with the poor dappled hill that got recycled for every darn outdoor scene? How was that both the Alps and the Von Trapp garden? And why did it look like a Macy’s window? When I was in fourth grade, I did this mad cool project wherein I bought a bunch of green styrofoam and poked fake flowers into it. Mythological forest presto. Anyhoo, the closing number took place on a more glittery version of my fourth grade project.
I didn’t pay much attention to the sound for some reason, but I think that the mixer fell asleep at some point. Opening sounded good, and the small group songs were solid, but then the orchestra would get randomly loud or the alto part would suddenly overwhelm the melody. At least Audra McDonald sounded fab for “Climb Every Mountain.”
Ultimately:
Yes, the script for the stage version is profoundly on-the-nose, but everyone knew that from the get-go. Either they needed to find actors who could make it work or they needed to pursue the screenplay. Writing is an element of the project’s trouble, but it’s not the primary explanation.
Not to over-speculate, but did the network get all up in the directors’ business and turn this into something cuckoo? Yes, Carrie Underwood probably should have played Sister Sophia instead, but she wasn’t the real problem. A whole range of folks made decisions that didn’t make one lick of sense and thus the performers weren’t set up to succeed and, you know, have fun. So I didn’t have fun watching them. Again, I haven’t a clue what happened behind the scenes. But that’s my couch-based perception.
Going to throw out an idea on the chance that, say, they film Oklahoma next: get a beautiful old theatre, refurbish it for this purpose, get a live audience, and film there. Do complete, honest-to-goodness live musical theater, and broadcast it into a zillion homes. Truly, I would forgive insane stunt casting under those circumstances. Also, I can’t imagine that this would be more expensive. My guess though? They didn’t want an uncontrollable element. Namely, an audience. Even though that is what theater is all about. Unpredictability can be magic. Unless you are a major network.
Unrelated:
How do the Von Trapps escape over the Alps into Switzerland at the end, seeing as Salzburg borders Germany? The Swiss border is, like, not close. Please explain.
foibles etc. 