The Sound of Music: a Dismal Wrong-headed Revival of this Musical
The next time the National Arts Centre English Theatre tackles something like The Sound of Music perhaps it should seek guidance from people who know what they’re doing.
Perhaps someone like Ottawa’s distinguished community theatre group, Orpheus, which has been around for more than a century and enjoys a solid reputation for maintaining professional standards in the staging of its musicals.
The NAC’s godawful treatment of a seminal Rodgers and Hammerstein hit will no doubt have its admirers. After all, familiarity breeds contentment, and there’s no surer way to ensure audience approval than to schedule a show so familiar, so popular, so ingrained in our cultural conscience, that we enter the theatre already humming the music we’re going to hear. Furthermore, there’s nothing like audience participation to ensure a further stilling of our discriminatory senses — hence the invitation we received the other night to sing along with the singers. If audience response seemed somewhat tepid on opening night, maybe that’s because some of the on-stage singing was falling lamentably below basic adequacy.
