Chichester has set quite a record for staging West End-quality musicals in recent times. This immaculate production is no exception. Director Adam Penford does not aim for any reinvention of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s final musical collaboration but creates a polished gem that glories in its faithfulness.
Premiering on Broadway in 1959, the Nazi-era drama of Maria, a novitiate nun-turned-governess (Gina Beck) to the von Trapp family, is still a syrupy love story and relentlessly smiley narrative about overcoming adversity. But there is an earnestness to it all here that really does make for feelgood theatre.
There are also, importantly, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s infectious songs – is there another musical with as many well-known numbers? They are not only sung gloriously by every performer but twinned with impish and imaginative choreography by Lizzi Gee, especially in the more playful songs such as Do-Re-Mi, when Maria teaches the children to sing, and The Lonely Goatherd, when they run into her room for fear of the thunder outside. The row of children, in their identical costumes, are adorable, their movements so carefully choreographed throughout that it seems like operetta, dance and musical theatre bound into one.
Robert Jones’s set glides smoothly between a cathedral grey backdrop and a palette of pastels which captures the old Austrian grandeur of the von Trapp household and brings shades of The Nutcracker.
Beck has a lovely wide-eyed radiance and the same haircut as Julie Andrews in the 1965 film, and a sometimes uncanny resemblance. She carries all her songs commandingly, from the ecstatic strains of her first number onwards. She also has a finely tuned balance between mischief and sincerity – we gun for her romance with the Captain (Edward Harrison), waiting for his heart to melt.
The opera singer Janis Kelly is inspired casting as Mother Abbess, with an especially soaring rendition of Climb Ev’ry Mountain, even if her role as Maria’s adviser bears the strains of a motivational coach, speaking of finding God – and love – in cheesy homilies. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s book as a whole is unashamedly cheesy. When God closes a door, he opens a door, we hear in a conversation between the Captain and Maria.
Yet, gritty reality still sneaks into the story and this production brings an eerie quality to its final scenes, following the Anschluss of 1938, when Nazi officers stand in the theatre’s aisles, surrounding the von Trapps as they perform in their singing competition in Salzburg. “Bless my homeland forever,” sings Harrison, in an achingly clear rendition of Edelweiss, and the song acquires sinister strains, its innocent patriotism bearing the potential to be interpreted differently by the onlooking stormtroopers. The image of this family in traditional Austrian dress could become a tableau of the Aryan dream on stage, in the hands of the Third Reich that is forcibly trying to enlist the captain, and the playful, marching-band undertones to the music turns into a booming martial beat.
So, a musical romance that has all the bases covered: a row of performing children, a posse of singing nuns, a slew of uplifting songs and a defeat for the Nazis as the von Trapps escape into the Alpine mountains. As Julie Andrews said: “What more do you need?”
At Chichester Festival theatre until 3 September
