Much like Peter Pan Live!, I benefited from watching this NBC live musical years after hearing about how bad it is. With my expectations sufficiently lowered, I was able to fully enjoy the good parts (and there are good parts,) and while it definitely has not-good parts too, I didn’t find them as dire as I’d previously heard them described.
Maria, a headstrong young novitiate, gets a gentle push from her Mother Superior that abbey life might not be for her. The Mother Superior lines her up with a new position working as a governess for the emotionally-repressed Captain von Trapp, a widower with seven children. In looking after the children, Maria brings music back into the house, and together, she and the family weather the coming storm of the Nazi incursion into Austria.
Just now as I was writing that description, I realized that you could probably argue that Maria’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I mean, she warms the cold heart of the handsome-but-distant captain, teaching him and his children how to live, running around making clothes out of curtains and stuff – there’s a world in which Zooey Deschanel would’ve played this role. The difference, though, is that this is firmly Maria’s story, and even if she’s a force for change in the von Trapps’ lives, the central focus is on her own life and her journey to discover what course she wants it to take. And someone whose narrative is centered on her own thoughts and feelings could never truly be considered a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
But anyway, onto the production. The design and staging are all capable if unremarkable, getting the job done without doing anything too extraordinary, and I appreciate that the songs with get here are as they are in the stage show, not the movie. That means singing “My Favorite Things” at the abbey instead of during the rainstorm, and it means the inclusion of a couple of book numbers that weren’t in the film (including one showing how certain characters are okay with backing the Nazis if they feel that’s the most advantageous position to be in.)
The cast is a little all over the map (although no one’s as lackluster as Hook in Peter Pan Live!) Carrie Underwood obviously has an excellent voice, and I’m not going to fault her for not singing like Julie Andrews, but as Maria, the issue is less with the singing than with the acting – I don’t get a lot of spark from her, and spark is what Maria is all about. Stephen Moyer is okay as Captain von Trapp, and the actors playing the kids all get the job done, with Ariane Reinhart’s Liesel probably being my favorite. As with Peter Pan Live!, it’s the actual Broadway vets in the supporting roles who are the lynchpins here. We’re talking Laura Benanti’s effortless performance as Elsa Schrader, Christian Borle’s excellent turn as Max Detweiler, and, especially, Audra McDonald blowing the roof off every song she sings as the Mother Superior. Whenever any of these three take center stage in a song, there’s at least a moderate sense of “hush now, the grownups are talking.” Oh man, I bet McDonald would’ve been a hell of a Maria when she was younger.
Warnings
Allusions to violence, drinking, and strong thematic elements.
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