Sound Of Music Wedding Dress Designer
It's a adventurous story: A adolescent woman, plucked from her cabalistic studies, reinvigorates a brackish association with the ability of her song.
["525.74"]I'm referring, of course, to 20-year-old Kerstin Anderson, who plays Maria von Trapp in the awakening of "The Sound of Music" alpha a civic bout at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.
Anderson was a green in agreeable amphitheater at Pace University in New York back she was apparent and advance assimilate the apple date as a appellant at an Austrian convent. She and Maria could be one person.
Intimidatingly, she is preceded in the role by two of the best admired stars in agreeable theater, Mary Martin and Julie Andrews. But Anderson takes allegation with a spirit so joyful, a animality so agile and coltish, and a acute so flawlessly soaring, that alone Frau Schraeder, Captain von Trapp's alone fiancée (Teri Hansen), could possibly abide her charm.
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I had heard that administrator Jack O'Brien, a three-time Tony Award champ as able-bodied as the above aesthetic administrator of the Old Globe in San Diego, was demography a abolitionist new access to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which in 1959 premiered on Broadway and in 1965 was fabricated into the constant film. That fabricated me anxious: What was he activity to do to my "Sound of Music?"
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I needn't accept worried: The Germans aren't aback the acceptable guys. Martians don't land. O'Brien's access can be compared to the affectionate of painting apology that strips abroad adorn that was too thickly activated during accomplished efforts.
Douglas W. Schmidt's set contributes to this effect: Its corrective Alpine backdrops access with ablaze colors. The walls of the Von Trapp abode assume to be fabricated of Salzburg lace. The aphotic basilica area Maria and the Captain ally is alluringly bathed in bleared sunlight from the aerial windows. It all looks so sparkling and alpha that the blur in my anamnesis seems hardly bedimmed by comparison.
That's not to say that that blur wasn't on my apperception as I watched. I was afraid by assertive departures from what I took as gospel: At the Ahmanson, Maria sings "My Favorite Things" with an accidentally able-bodied and active Mother Abbess (the assertive accompanist Ashley Brown, who starred in "Mary Poppins" on Broadway) rather than with the accouchement during the thunderstorm. Maria sings "The Lonely Goatherd" during the thunderstorm instead — afterwards the boob actualization I accepted as my due. It's the arch adolescent Brigitta (Svea Johnson) rather than the artful Frau Schraeder who informs Maria that Captain von Trapp is in adulation with her.
But all three scenes about-face out to be from the aboriginal script: They were afflicted for the movie. This assembly additionally includes two songs that didn't arise in the film: "How Can Adulation Survive?" and "No Way to Stop It." Both are articulate by Frau Schraeder and her acquaintance Max Detweiler (Merwin Foard), the hardly arrant but ambrosial aptitude abettor who gives the Trapp Ancestors Singers their aboriginal break.
Both numbers add nuances: We apprentice from the aboriginal that Frau Schraeder is a cynic, whose motives for marrying the Captain are accumulated rather than romantic; and from the second, we apprentice that both she and Max intend to abet with the German invaders, clashing the idealistic, affectionate captain. The songs are addictive and lively, and yet, still, not absolutely necessary. During both, I noticed my adolescent accompaniment craning her close for the abutting actualization of the ambrosial Von Trapp children.
["970"]All seven of them, by the way, are able-bodied casting and directed: from the tiny Gretl (Audrey Bennett) to the blossom 16-year-old Liesl (Paige Silvester), whose adventurous affiliation with the awkward boyhood Rolf (Dan Tracy) is choreographed by Danny Mefford with a active innocent sexuality, culminating in a mild kiss. I begin all of them added accustomed and agreeable actuality than the accouchement in the film. Maria is able to win them over with arresting acceleration — it takes aloof one annular of "Do-Re-Mi" — but afresh again, she had the aforementioned aftereffect on me.
Christopher Plummer's Captain von Trapp, in the movie, was active in basic my abstraction of adventurous love: From him I abstruse that the man would be annealed and abhorrent and would consistently attending hardly annoyed, alike if waltzing with me in a gazebo. (I didn't apprentice until abundant too backward that Plummer was generally afraid over during the filming of the movie)
Ben Davis makes a acutely friendlier Captain, one I am alike emboldened to alarm Georg. Yes, he is ascetic and awkward with his seven children, bathrobe them in sailor apparel and alleviative them like a argosy crew, but afterwards a bit of pro-forma bluster, he is acquisitive beneath Maria's access to change his ways. The beginning couple's rapport, meanwhile, is the adverse of stiff: The way they cook into anniversary added suggests that they're not marrying aloof for the account of the children. "So abundant kissing!" my adolescent accompaniment observed.
In the aforementioned way, the Nazis' blackmail to the new lovers' break has become added visceral: The German assailment on Austria is visually as able-bodied as emotionally jarring, abnormally back the ancestors charge accomplish in their bizarre folk apparel in advanced of blood-red banners emblazoned with swastikas.
Perhaps the best accidentally affective aspect of the assembly is its admiring assuming of the nuns, who rather than the hardly absurd abstracts of the cine assume actuality to be the abiding moral centermost of the world, abysmal in their aphotic cloister, agilely attention the beggared and animated on love. Watching them dress Maria in her bells dress (a knockout by apparel artist Jane Greenwood) fabricated me ambition acceptance could be a antecedent of abundance in our world, instead of the alibi for abhorrence it all too frequently becomes.
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'The Sound of Music'
Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays (call for exceptions); ends Oct. 31
Tickets: From $25-$150
["474.33"]Info: (213) 628-2772, www.centertheatregroup.org
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
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