Stratford Festival: Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music & Carousel. Avon Theatre. Tuesday, June 23, 2015.
Stratford – Seventy-two years have passed since Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein took Broadway by storm with Oklahoma, their first collaboration. It was a hit, and so good that many doubted the duo could match its success with their second show, but, in fact, many theater-goers and a number of critics as well-considered Carousel, produced two years later, even better. The team went on to dominate the musical comedy genre for decades. The Sound of Music (1965), their last show together, was a huge success.
This year, the Stratford Festival presented new productions of both Carousel and The Sound of Music, and in so doing offered an extraordinary overview of a historic collaboration.
Carousel is a daring musical in that its leading man, Billy Bigelow, is lazy and dishonest, and he will do whatever he must to get what he wants. One cannot feel much sympathy for this guy. By contrast, Julie Jordan, the woman who loves him, is pure as the driven snow. Despite Bigelow’s unsympathetic character, the show works because the scoundrel is given a chance to redeem himself from beyond the grave. Billy treats Julie very badly – it is an abusive relationship – but he truly loves their daughter, whom he did not live to know. In the end, true love and justice triumph and as the entire company belts out a resounding rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, there is scarcely a dry eye in the house.
Stratford’s Carousel was well-cast. Jonathan Winsby as Billy Bigelow was handsome, mean and appropriately remorseful at the end, and he had an outstanding singing voice. As Julie Jordan, a character with little development in the show (she remains pretty much the same empty dress at the end that she was at the beginning), Alexis Gordon was pretty, lovable and also sang well. Alana Hibbert was very convincing in the role of Nettie Fowler, delivering her songs with authority and effectively projecting the strength of her character.
Susan H. Schulman’s direction was excellent, if traditional, and the staging was consistently compelling. Yes, there was a real carousel (merry-go-round) on stage in several scenes, but best of all may have been the magnificent white winged horse that the Starkeeper rode in on in the later scenes of the show.
Although The Sound of Music was a tremendous commercial triumph for Rogers and Hammerstein, and many of the songs in the show have become beloved on their own, some critics found it too commercial and saccharine in its sentiments, and while the movie version quickly became a popular favourite, many found it overblown, with real mountains overpowering the story.
At the Stratford performance I attended – a full house, by the way – I would guess that nearly everyone in the audience had seen the film. I was curious to see how they would react to what would then be for them a scaled-down version of the story. No mountains, no castles, no vast Austrian vistas. By the end of the performance, it was clear to me that no one was disappointed by what they had seen and heard. The Sound of Music works even better as a stage show than it does as a movie.
That said, a Stratford production of The Sound of Music is not your average stage production. The standard of production and performance is incredibly high. Director Donna Feore’s use of the open stage of the Festival Theatre, with its endless possibilities for entrances and exits and a space that can be transformed in seconds with a few props added or subtracted, is quite simply superb.
The music in this production was almost beyond praise. Both as actress and singer, Stephanie Rothenberg in the title role of Maria Rainer made an indelible impression in her Stratford debut. Her voice is powerful, but also capable of conveying a wide range of emotion. Her acting is the key to the success of the entire show, and she held nothing back. There is no doubt about it; Stephanie Rothenberg has “star” quality.
The second outstanding vocal performance in the show was by Anita Krause, as the Mother Abbess. Her rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” at the end of Act I was full-bore operatic, in the best sense. Also noteworthy was the solid but sensitive singing of the Nuns.
The fact that there is no male singing lead is one of the peculiarities of The Sound of Music, and one doesn’t expect Captain von Trapp to have a great voice; it is essentially an acting role. That said, Ben Carlson’s Captain was, to my mind, somewhat less tough and authoritarian than he might have been in his early appearances. At the beginning of the show, we are introduced to a Captain von Trapp who treats his children – who, by the way, together with Maria gave us some of the show’s most delightful moments – as if they were part of a military unit. He whistles commands to them as if he were still in the Navy, and he even has them dressed in uniforms. It is only later in the show, under the influence of Maria, that he softens and begins to treat them as young people in need of a loving father. But whatever one might think of Carlson’s rather wimpy reading of his role, or of his weak singing voice, one must concede that his performance of “Edelweiss” was very touching.
Readers might well ask why “The Classical Traveler” is reviewing Broadway shows at the Stratford Festival. Carousel and The Sound of Music are not opera; they are not even operetta. Or are they? The earliest American musical comedies were very similar in style and structure to Viennese operettas. Sigmund Romberg is very much in the tradition of Franz Lehar and Johann Strauss. The format is much the same, long stretches of dialogue periodically relieved by catchy tunes for soloists or ensembles and with lots of dancing too. What makes the American musicals different is the use of American themes and locales – Carousel is set in Maine and Oklahoma set, not surprisingly, in Oklahoma – and the increasing use of American musical idioms.
The Rogers and Hammerstein musicals are certainly not opera. Opera is nearly always more complex and makes greater demands on its soloists and choruses. One must also consider that the purpose was different. The Rogers and Hammerstein shows were written for Broadway, not for the Metropolitan Opera, and they were backed financially by people who hoped that they would not only get their money back but make a hefty profit on their investment.
Still, it is not possible to dismiss the artistic merits of a Rogers and Hammerstein musical simply because their shows made money; they were also artistically successful. Both Carousel and the Sound of Music tell dramatic stories very effectively and often use music to underscore emotion and reveal character. “If I Loved You” is both a conventional love song and a profound expression of the complexity of an ill-fated relationship.
My point is that musicals of the quality of those created by Rogers and Hammerstein are, at their best, part of the rich tradition of classical music, and represent a uniquely American contribution to its development in the Twentieth Century. Leonard Bernstein took the genre a step further, and composers and lyricists such as Stephen Sondheim have made us marvel anew at how words and music can work together to expand our understanding of the human condition.
Rogers and Hammerstein changed the course of musical history, but even today very little is known about how they worked together. Hopefully, that is about to change. Todd S. Purdom is writing a biography on their collaboration to be published in 2018, the 75th anniversary of their first musical together, Oklahoma.
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