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Kevin Kwong

The Sound of Music

Lyric Theatre, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts

Until October 23

Comparisons and high expectations  are the  inevitable challenges this Tony Award-winning Broadway musical faces today.

The Sound of Music movie from 1965  has been so successful that people often forget that the stage production actually preceded    Julie Andrews  blasting out 'the hills are alive' by six years.

Directed by Dallett Norris,  with Michael Duff  in the musical director seat, this touring production  does not disappoint.

While the music is more or less the same - barring two songs that are not featured in the movie (How Can Love Survive and No Way to Stop It) and one from the soundtrack not included in this show (I Have Confidence in Me) - the story is actually quite different.

It opens not with novice Maria Rainer   (Jennifer Semrick)  singing  in the hills, but with the angelic voices of  nuns  launching into a morning prayer.  The  singing is so clear and perfect you  could mistake it  for a recording.

In the Broadway original, Maria gets sent to the Von Trapp family to look after the widowed captain's seven children. She  soon falls in love with the captain, Georg Von Trapp  (Jim Ballard).  Elsa Schraeder   (Friesia Schuil),  the captain's fiancee, is  nowhere near as 'evil' as the Austrian Baroness Schraeder in the movie; neither is Rolf Gruber  (Douglas Ullman Jr),  the telegraph  boy and boyfriend of the captain's  daughter, Liesl (Carla Stickler).

The musical runs just more than two hours, packed with top-notch singing. Semrick makes a confident Maria, while Beth Kirkpatrick  is the true star as the Mother Abbess. Ballard is too subdued as the captain and is a far better singer than actor.

Definitely worth a mention is the 20-piece orchestra.  It is a collaboration between Duff, seven  US musicians, and 13 local players assembled and co-ordinated by the Hong Kong Sinfonietta.   The Viennese waltzes  are sublime.



Forget the film and listen to the sound of some wonderful music