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A Fresh Take On ‘The Sound of Music’

Fresh take on
Maria and the kids in The Sound of Music (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

By Michelle F. Solomon, FloridaTheaterOnStage.com, for SouthFloridaReporter.com, Dec. 31, 2015 – How do you solve a problem of taking a 56-year old American musical classic and making it fresh for a modern audience? If you’re director Jack O’Brien, you lovingly dust the tarnish off of The Sound of Music and imbue it with a freshness that’s as crisp as the snow-covered Austrian Alps.

The hills are alive in this new touring production of the old chestnut, mostly because of O’Brien’s vision, which includes younger casting than usual for the actresses who play Maria and Mother Abbess, yet maintains a respect for the old-fashioned piousness of the sisters who inhabit the Nonnberg Abbey.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s story about a spirited postulant whose impish ways get her sent away from the nunnery to serve as governess for seven children of a widowed Naval Captain won a 1965 Academy Award for the film’s director Robert Wise, who had scriptwriter Ernest Lehman fiddle with the original book to expand the story for the big screen.

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