Aided by an excellent cast, the outgoing Curve director steers clear of camp to present an irresistibly melodic musical in its unadulterated form<\/p>\n
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Like Rolf the Nazi telegraph boy, you can depend on Paul Kerryson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to be cynical about Rodgers and Hammerstein<\/a>\u2019s 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<\/a> has no business being in the theatre. Or possibly even on the planet.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. In truth, the literal approach isn\u2019t aided by Al Parkinson\u2019s frumpy set, which seems to invite the Von Trapp family to climb every hillock<\/a>. But musically it\u2019s in great shape, with Ben Atkinson\u2019s new orchestration trimming the excess of strings but refusing to skimp on the flugelhorn.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s clan \u2013 certainly the team I saw \u2013 were terrific: cute as buttons but with sufficient rough edges to suggest these are real kids rather than stage-school automatons. The grownups aren\u2019t bad either: the bold resistance to Anschluss shown by Michael French\u2019s Captain von Trapp is neatly contrasted with the moral slipperiness of Mark Inscoe\u2019s Max to make it clear that evil proliferates only when good men are prepared to do nothing. Laura Pitt-Pulford<\/a> 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\u2019s no greater problem-solver than Maria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Guardian -Monday 8 December 2014 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\u2019s Leicester musical productions to deliver. Yet after five years at the helm of the … Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":257,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-7468","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7469,"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7468\/revisions\/7469"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-french.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}