The Sound of Music
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Ballarat Lyric Theatre
Civic Hall, Ballarat
30/6-9/7/23
https://hermaj.com/events/the-sound-of-music/
If you can get to Ballarat while this is still on, do. It’s a bit of magic, much better value than Harry Potter and relying on the specialest effects of great writing, music, acting and singing.
I have never seen the musical, and only seen bits of the film between ad breaks. But songs I have nonetheless heard a million times somehow sounded tonight like they were coming out of real people’s mouths for the first time, as if they’d just thought of what to say but couldn’t find any way but to sing it.
The kids were great, of course they were. Maria (Jenna Featherstone) was luminous, like Julie Who luminous, which meant Georg (David Sheludko) needed ballast, without losing his smoulder, while landing an arc from blowing whistles to singing Edelweiss. This Georg pulled that off; the love was all there.
Max (Callan Lewis) and Elsa (Oriel Forsyth) have the tough job of cranking the plot along with the handful of non-famous songs that are still wonderful, just not Edelweiss. And they were perfect like that.
Edelweiss though, was beyond perfect. Again, I never realised how powerful it is when it appears for the first time late in the show. It’s a gut punch, relieved sweetly by people joining in, first the cast then the audience too, crooning imperfectly all around.
For all its banal repetition in the world you can forget that it’s sung in defiance of Nazism, defiance that got real people and their families killed. Here we are in our comfortable seats in 2023, wobbling along, but Georg and Maria look like they know what’s at stake. Beautiful stuff.
Finally the nuns. As black and white bookends to the action, hard to tell apart from the dress circle, their Greek chorus role is tricky and often lampooned. But these nuns transcended caricature so well, while their a capella work, much more complex than I realised from the movie, was spot on.
And then we come to the Mother Abbess (Anna Marshall). Well. I once heard her sing as a teenager and thought she sounded like a 40 year old star with decades under her belt. Now she’s 40 or so, she sounds, well ageless.
I never realised from the movie that Climb Every Mountain could do what Anthem does in Chess, or what You’ll Never Walk Alone does in Carousel, which is blast the fourth wall apart and take the audience somewhere that’s neither the world of the script nor the regular world.
For a few minutes it’s in this third space where we forget both whose line it is and where exactly tf we are. That takes superior songwriting placed in just the right spot in an excellent story.
But it takes a special set of pipes to pull it off. If you only have 5 minutes passing through Ballarat, time it for just before interval and you’ll get your admission’s worth. Of course if you can hang around she does it again to close the show, and where else did you really have to be anyway?
The rest of the production punches well above its weight for an amateur company, but then Ballarat Lyric Theatre has always done that. You can be rude about the weather, but they put on a bloody good show in this town.
The Normal Grown-Up 