The Salzburg Landestheater, in late-Covid desperation, has pulled together a new cast for its shopworn 10 year-old, tourist-aimed production of The Sound of Music.
Whaddaya know? The locals can’t get enough of it.
Report here.
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I was about 16 when I first saw The Sound of Music. I went with my parents — we did a movie together about once a year at that point, where I was seeing more with my mates. Usually a “big” movie, like My Fair Lady or Doctor Zhivago.
My strongest memory was of thinking the damned thing was over twice before it was. I also found it revoltingly corny. (I had not found MFL or Mary Poppins to be so, but TSOM ruined Julie Andrews for me forever). I thought Christopher Plummer, whom I had adored since seeing Hamlet in Elsinore, looked embarrassed. But the only song I liked in it was Edelweiss.
I watched it a few years ago to see if I had perhaps been harsh, and perhaps hated it less, but not much. It is pure corn, it’s still too long, and Julie is still too saccharine to be true. Plummer, whom I came to know years later, still looked embarrassed.
Yes, the scenery is nice, but what do these people see in it? Or hear?
Plummer, of course, famously called the film “The Sound of Mucus”!! The scenery is to-die-for and the orchestrations of Kostal were just wonderful. I refused to see it as a teenager because I was at a convent school and was completely over nuns!! How I disliked their billing and cooing about the film.
I didn’t see it the first time until I was in my 30s and I loved “The Lonely Goatherd” and still do. Clever writing and orchestration. But I learned that at least some Austrians were opposed to Hitler.
I’ve never liked Julie Andrews, thinking her cold and one-dimensional.
For many years the resident tenor at the Salzburg Landestheater was Josef Kostlinger — best known as Tamino in Ingmar Bergman’s MAGIC FLUTE movie.
It isn’t so much the locals that demand it. It is the tourist trade – especially those coming in for a day or two to the city. The same crowd that visits the SOM pavillion at Hellbrunn , take the SOM bicycle tours, …
Americans. Pretty much all they know about Austria.