A review of ‘The Sound of Music’

Although we tend to think of Broadway musicals as grand spectacles with big casts, extravagant sets and huge production numbers, the past decade has seen a counter-trend: the minimal musical — for example, a Sweeney Todd in which cast members double as the orchestra.

Festival 56’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” is not so tiny, but Director Dexter Brigham and the Festival 56 technical crew have honed the show into a gem-like setting in the intimate Grace Theatre.

Adam Spencer’s unit set, a series of gothic arches and tracery cutouts, triples as Nonnburg Abbey, the Von Trapp villa, and the snow-capped Alps themselves. The gray stonework of the arches, along with similarly black and white opening costumes, also suggests the strictures the heroine Maria encounters both in the abbey and in the Von Trapp household, a monochromatic scheme that remains unbroken until the appearance of the Von Trapp children in their play clothes cut from old curtains. Brigham has added a frame to the story, with an aged Captain returning to the scenes of his first meeting with the young postulant Maria, an interesting idea but somewhat under-realized and perhaps too evocative of a similar device in “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

One aspect of the small set and small cast is that Nonnburg Abbey, usually presented as a rather grand establishment, becomes a very small community. In fact, the Abbess herself takes her turn at the washboard during “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” — which is also punctuated by the naysaying Sister Berthe (Nancy Evans) taking out some of her frustration with a dustbeater on an innocent area rug. The show’s opening “Preludium,” lit only by candles, is particularly effective because we are able to see the nuns as individual points of light, rather than a mass.

Kristen O’Connell plays a joyous Maria with a beautiful singing voice. A nice touch is given to “Do-Re-Mi” when Maria pauses to think of an appropriate imagery for each pitch-syllable, which also gives the children time to react, first with some suspicion, and then with growing enjoyment. Four of the Von Trapp girls are double-cast. The Friday night cast — Tara Kunkel, Jenna Grimmer, Emma Roden and Abigail Kamke, along with Doran Cotter, Carl Schneider, and Melissa Joiner — began as tough-cookie kids that one can easily imagine driving off 11 previous governesses.