Best wishes to them all!
The Sound of Music is not just any musical; it is part of the modern Western canon, deservedly so.
It is now so familiar we forget how, even to the end of their collaboration, Rodgers and Hammerstein could blend popular storytelling with challenging material. We sometimes smile at the show's innocence, but we forget that those most sophisticated authors (including Lindsay and Crouse) wanted to write about just that: a story of both innocence and experience, a story that begins with mere "hills" and ends with "mountains" as a young woman steps beyond the protections of childhood and convent into the complex world which challenges integrity and which forces decisions which have real consequences, morally and physically.
(The biggest thing R&H did was to bring a sense of real consequences into American musical theatre.)
It is a delicately structured work, which contains four quite different disciplines, each in conflict with another: the discipline of the convent, which is redeemed by love; the discipline of Von Trapp's grief, which is healed by music; the discipline of music itself,which brings liberation; and finally, the grinding, irredeemable 'discipline' of Nazism, which is borne of hatred and by contrast to all the others is thoroughly condemned.
Also of great structural wonder is that the escape part of the story, which makes up the second half of Act Two, is brilliantly bound to the earlier "rites of passage" story by employing mostly reprises of songs from the earlier part of the score - thus creating an artistic unity which could otherwise have been unsatisfyingly shattered.
And the songs! Where would we be, and can anyone imagine what would be missing, if we did not have the song "Do Re Mi"? Equally, "Edelweiss", which in context beautifully captures innocence surrounded by evil and typifies the entirety?
But the score also has the sophisticated cynicism of "How Can Love Survive?" and "No Way To Stop It", (which in its own way prefigures the attitudes of corruptive apathy found in "Cabaret" a few years later) - Hammerstein lyrically triumphing in a mode not normally associated with him, yet so apt for the characters of Max and Elsa.
We may forget too that in this, the stage version, Von Trapp breaks off with Elsa not just because he is in love with Maria, but because Elsa is prepared to collaborate with the Nazis, or at least acquiesce, and he refuses - integrity again! This bold strength of storytelling, this subtance, is so typical of the R&H canon.
So, thank you ahead of time, cast, crew, producers - for caring enough again to place this essential story of our times back before us in fresh form. I hope we learn from it again how to be ever more human, ever more humane, as Oscar and Richard would have wanted.
What brave people on Thursday night! We're with you all the way!
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