Before I rip on seeing the Sound of Music yesterday, has there ever been a good production of Sound of Music? I mean aside from the dresses and the songs, have you seen this play?
I couldn't say anything because the cousins I was with paid for my ticket and there were teenagers who I didn't want to kill their vibe, but the broken escalator in the parking lot that we walked up to land on murder infested swollen hot dogs on grills Hollywood Blvd was WAY better than the show.
People should go to theater. Definitely kids should be clapping to keep tinkerbell alive in a dark theater, in a group of hopefulness.
People should not have to pay 7000 dollars a ticket to watch the father in Sound of Music who had the sex appeal of a potato gone bad, although let's face it Captain Von Trapp if you draw straws, is probably the worst male role you can score on Broadway. You have nothing to do but stand there in your wool jacket holding your whistle while everyone frolics like goats around you. The NUNS have more sex appeal. And why is the biggest song Climb Every Mountain? That nun with the huge lungs gets the most applause and I'm not sure she's ever even climbed ANY mountain, sure she can belt out the tune that tears the paper off the back wall, but in reality she's a nun screaming her work ethic song to timid Maria and shoveling her out into the world, while she herself goes back to eating god wafers and doing a little gardening.
Speaking of huge, when the play started I could see the whole stage it was pretty sweet and then the world's tallest man came in late and sat directly in front of me like imagine the Sears Tower WALKED IN, carrying an industrial steel refrigerator, and they both sat down inches from the front of your face.
So I spent the whole rest of the three hour show tipping right, tipping left, bending my head so I could look under his shoulder like an accordion monkey.
I was scared to go to this show anyway cause I had to ride in a car with people and make conversation, in SOMEONE ELSE'S CAR, but I aced that guys, and then I had to be in a room with like 40 thousand people which is still weird since Covid, but I didn't mind just feeling like I was in the shallow end at the beach with fifty thousand of my closest friends all crammed in a semi-circle salad wedge like a half eaten human layer cake. My friend Rebecca said find 2 surprising things (she's always good with how to allay anxiety by making it a treasure hunt instead) so the best one was as we were walking into the theater with the crowd we were behind two older guys and one said do you wanna go in first (indicating the row of seats) and the other guy said I don't wanna go in AT ALL.
It woulda been fun to sit by those guys.
Yes I realize I'm incredibly lucky to get to sit under the art deco Pantages ceiling and rip apart a show that people actually rehearsed for months just to make it this bad. I was imagining my plays up there and my stuff needs a much smaller audience and the intimacy of fresh awkwardness. So perhaps this isn't my venue.
Before we got in I said Gretl better not suck, I'm here to see the tiniest Von Trapp. They kept picking up Gretl to make her appear younger but Gretl looked like an eighth grader and she could barely talk. I whispered to my niece is Gretl retarded? And then my favorite character Brigitta was NOT played by Angela Cartwright, the greatest Brigitta who ever lived because she played it in the movie sweet, vulnerable, kind, open and this Brigitta looked like a Swiss Miss Urkel she said all her lines loud and squinting behind glasses, and with no inflection like the director said NO, DO IT EVEN MORE BROADLY. The director clearly was sleeping with an intern and fooling around in the back row of the theater instead of watching rehearsals because that's how you get actors not soft and endearing, that's how you miss moments of real feeling, that's how you project nothing and you come away from the show like you opened all your paper dolls, cut them out and then bored, set them on fire.
The best part of the show? The art deco ceiling of the Pantages that looked like swirly mermaid hair and crazy cut out designs and vibrant dark blue and the velvet seats, and the hole in front of us onstage where the possibility of so much human beauty and art could be displayed for us as humans to watch and feel. There's always a chance.
I thought of the real Maria Von Trapp, whose biography weirdly I had read a few months ago from the library, and how I had to skip over most parts because it was so crammed with god there was barely any space for music. And music was big to her. Also her real kids were named terrible names like Hedwig, Werner, Agathe and when they were touring the country singing their family act was so stiff and hymnal that no audiences wanted to come and it wasn't until they screwed up a song by accident once and started laughing onstage that Maria looked around and said oh man maybe we should interact with the audience, so we're like together on this, and THEN at that moment she married strudel hair and lederhosen and petticoat dresses with cheerful songs and cherubic kid faces and the Sound of Music became a thing.
Layee o de layee o de lay hee hooThe ancient Maria, in her ghostly yodeling outfit, musta been standing at the back of the theater with her ghost children last night, way back in the last row so she could see over the guy in front of me, and she must've been eating a fat hot Bavarian heaven pretzel, holding hands with god and shaking her braided head whispering to him that's not how it was at allll. But that show did pay for her to open a singing camp in the summers in Vermont. It's still there, Trapp Family Lodge. The summer camp that god and vocal cords built.
For when you need a little austrian to remind you to simply remember your favorite things
and then you won't feel so bad.
