After an early stumble, 'The Sound of Music' at Mirvish climbs ev'ry mountain

The three-minute song is one of the many emotional summits in this final collaboration from the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It’s also representative of director Jack O’Brien’s staging as a whole, which has rolled into the Princess of Wales Theatre for what feels like the umpteenth time in the past decade. 

It’s a production that does indeed climb ev’ry one of the musical’s mountains — but not without first pulling itself out of a pretty deep valley.

As Maria, the singing postulant-turned governess of the seven von Trapp children, Capaldi makes a less than ideal initial impression. In the show’s title song (and the character’s first number), her acting and singing come across as stiff. Not quite the carefree “flibbertigibbet,” “will-o’-the-wisp” and “clown” whom the nuns at the abbey describe her to be, Capaldi’s Maria looks, if anything, like she’s more concerned about rolling an ankle as she tentatively prances about the Austrian Alps. 

Things don’t improve in the next number, “Maria.” What should be a playful quartet among the Mother Abbess and Sisters Berthe, Margaretta and Sophia (Jade Litaker, Tess Primack and Meredith Lustig) instead more closely resembles a funeral dirge thanks to conductor Jonathan Marro’s leaden tempo. (I should note: The original Broadway production did take a pretty slow tempo for the song, as well. Subsequent stagings tended to speed it up. But this version feels like the slowest — and most tedious — of them all.) 

By this point in the show, I was expecting the rest of this production to be a dud. But something changes about 30 minutes into the first act. And it coincides with the arrival of the von Trapp children (portrayed by Ariana Ferch, Eli Vander Griend, Ava Davis, Benjamin Stasiek, Haddie Mac, Ruby Caramore and Luciana Vandette). 

The actors playing these children can make or break “The Sound of Music.” When I last saw O’Brien’s production in Singapore, featuring a different cast, the children were so cloying (exuding an annoying, puppy-dog sentimentality) that I couldn’t have cared less if the von Trapp kids were tossed into Miss Hannigan’s ramshackle orphanage. 

That’s never the case with this company of youngsters, though. Yes, they’re adorable and sing sweetly. But they’re also tough-edged, hardened to living without their mother, and with their tiger parent of a father. 

When she’s opposite these children, Capaldi grows into her role impressively. Her Maria is mature and poised, yet at times also playfully goofy. She possesses a crystalline voice to boot, lending sumptuous lyricism to numbers like “Do-Re-Mi” and “My Favourite Things.”  

Arguably the best part of this production, though, is the chemistry between Capaldi and Kevin Earley as Captain Georg von Trapp. I’ve seen four different stage iterations of “The Sound of Music,” and never have I been more invested in Maria and Georg’s relationship than in this one. Much of this is a testament to Capaldi. We feel every bit of her internal struggle after she learns of the Captain’s feelings for her.

But Earley, too, is excellent, by far the best sounding Captain I’ve ever heard, with an expressive voice that finds new shades of colour in songs like “Edelweiss.”

As the show’s younger couple, Ferch and Ian Coursey deliver a tender rendition of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” as Liesl and Rolf, respectively, even though they’re hindered by some of Danny Mefford’s awkward choreography. 

And as the duo of Max and Elsa (the latter of whom seeks the Captain’s hand in marriage), Nicholas Rodriguez and Kate Loprest ratchet up the sly, treacherous nature of these Nazi-sympathizing opportunists. (If you recognize Rodriguez’s name, it’s because he played the Captain when O’Brien’s revival debuted in Toronto eight years ago.) 

O’Brien’s staging offers a thoroughly traditional interpretation of the material, with sumptuous sets by Douglas W. Schmidt that are everything you’d expect from a production of this classic Broadway musical. And unlike some other iterations of the show, such as the 1998 Broadway revival, this version hews closer to the 1959 original Broadway production than the 1965 film adaptation starring Julie Andrews, which featured new songs like Maria’s “I Have Confidence.” 

For those who’ve never seen “The Sound of Music” live on stage before, O’Brien’s unfussy production is worth a watch. But for those who’ve seen the musical before, this staging may leave you thinking about better ones from years’ past. (For me, Donna Feore’s note-perfect Stratford Festival revival in 2015 immediately comes to mind.) 

But still: When this “Sound of Music” breaks into song, it scales mountaintops. And as I walked out of the Princess of Wales Theatre after the opening night performance, I found myself humming along to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic tunes all the way home. They’ll probably be stuck in my head until the next time this show returns to town. And for a classic work like “The Sound of Music,” that’s pretty much all you can ask for.