Aided by an excellent cast, the outgoing Curve director steers clear of camp to present an irresistibly melodic musical in its unadulterated form
Like Rolf the Nazi telegraph boy, you can depend on Paul Kerryson’s Leicester musical productions to deliver. Yet after five years at the helm of the Curve (and prior to that, the Haymarket since 1991), this is the show with which the outgoing artistic director finally says so long, farewell auf wiedersehen, goodnight.
It’s easy to be cynical about Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final and most overtly sentimental score. But anyone whose heart does not soften a little at the sight of seven little Tyroleans in sailor suits bobbing through the sol-fa scale has no business being in the theatre. Or possibly even on the planet.
Kerryson avoids high camp and over-conceptualisation to present the show in its unadulterated form as an almost embarrassingly melodic, mostly true story about a singing nun who needs to get out of the habit. In truth, the literal approach isn’t aided by Al Parkinson’s frumpy set, which seems to invite the Von Trapp family to climb every hillock. But musically it’s in great shape, with Ben Atkinson’s new orchestration trimming the excess of strings but refusing to skimp on the flugelhorn.
A slightly sour review of the original Broadway production suggested that The Sound of Music is a show that suffers from little children. But Leicester’s clan – certainly the team I saw – were terrific: cute as buttons but with sufficient rough edges to suggest these are real kids rather than stage-school automatons. The grownups aren’t bad either: the bold resistance to Anschluss shown by Michael French’s Captain von Trapp is neatly contrasted with the moral slipperiness of Mark Inscoe’s Max to make it clear that evil proliferates only when good men are prepared to do nothing. Laura Pitt-Pulford is a persuasively resourceful and golden-toned governess whose ability to run up a complete set of play clothes from a pair of nursery curtains shows that there’s no greater problem-solver than Maria.
