‘The Sound of Music’ returns to the CT theater where it all began

The first audiences to ever hear the songs “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” “Do-Re-Mi,” “My Favorite Things,” “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” “So Long, Farewell” and the rest of the score for one of the most famous musicals of all time, “The Sound of Music,” were sitting in the Shubert Theatre in New Haven on Oct. 3, 1959.

The latest national tour of the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic, based on the true adventures of the singing Von Trapp family who lived in Nazi-occupied Austria during World War II, brings “The Sound of Music” back to the Shubert for six performances March 26-29.

The new go-round is a variation on a previous tour that played the Waterbury Palace and the Shubert in 2017. Jack O’Brien, who directed both that tour and this new one, said that his interest was in figuring out what made “The Sound of Music” so triumphant in its earliest productions. “At first I didn’t want to do it at all. I thought ‘Why would anyone want me to do ‘The Sound of Music’?’ But they told me to ‘Go in there and shake this thing up!’”

O’Brien is a longtime Connecticut resident whose Broadway musical hits include “Hairspray” and “The Full Monty.” He oversaw the tour of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which extensively revised and improved on the earlier Broadway version that was a substantial reworking of a British version. The tour of his most recent Broadway hit, “Shucked,” came to The Bushnell last month.

O’Brien famously keeps tinkering on shows until he gets them right. That’s why he revisited “The Sound of Music.” “This is the 60th anniversary of the movie. We did a tour 10 years ago around the 50th anniversary, but I feel like I didn’t finish it. There were huge revelations.”

O’Brien reinvigorated the stage version of “The Sound of Music” by ignoring the changes the film version, directed by Robert Wise, had made to the original stories. Some of those changes made it into subsequent live tours in the ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond.

“Everybody thinks it’s a movie,” O’Brien said. “Rodgers & Hammerstein hated the movie. Robert Wise took a lot of liberties. He played down the Nazi thing. He eliminated the trios” — referring to the musical arrangements of songs like “No Way to Stop It,” the overtly political song sung by Captain von Trapp with his friends Baroness Elsa and Max Detweiler that was cut from the film altogether. Elsa and Max have different ideas about how to deal with the Germans than the Captain does. “They’re recruiting him to their cause, and use music to do it. It’s very, very subtle. I discovered that too late for the last tour, so this time I started asking questions about it again. I know how you can keep looking deeper and deeper.”

The Broadway show ran for 1,443 performances, from late 1959 to the summer of 1963. Just as impressively, the Broadway soundtrack album it was on the Billboard charts for 276 weeks: It was in the top 10 for 109 of those weeks and No. 1 for 16 weeks, often beating back Beatlemania for Billboard dominance. When the soundtrack of “The Sound of Music” movie starring Julie Andrews and longtime Connecticut resident Christopher Plummer was released in 1965, it was also on the charts for years and, until “Saturday Night Fever” in 1977, was the highest-selling movie soundtrack of all time, selling over 20 million copies.

The U.S. Library of Congress has put together an “Inside the Vault” exhibit charting the history of “The Sound of Music” and specifically, six of the songs from the musical. The exhibit will be presented at many of the stops on the musical’s tour.

O’Brien said his production restored the elements that made “The Sound of Music” work onstage in the first place. The show, which has a book by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse (the surefooted writers of such colossal stage hits as “Life With Father” and “Anything Goes”), was originally built around tightly composed separate scenes with clear changes of environment and tone.

“Lindsay and Crouse were playwrights who knew how to structure a drama,” O’Brien said. “I contend that the solution to making ‘The Sound of Music’ work was to interrupt that smooth flow of the movie. I took the varnish off.”

O’Brien is continuing to make changes for this tour, which involves the same main creative team as it did in 2017-18. He took some leaps with casting, which may seem obvious but don’t happen often enough. The lead role of nun-turned-nanny-turned-entertainer-turned-newlywed Maria was originally played on Broadway (and at the Shubert before Broadway) by the all-American, Texas-born Mary Martin of “Peter Pan” and “South Pacific” Broadway fame. In the movie, Maria was played by the quintessentially British Julie Andrews, known for “My Fair Lady” on stage and “Mary Poppins” on film. O’Brien wanted someone moodier and more Germanic for his Maria. In Cayleigh Capaldi, the director said he “finally got a girl who’s not a high school cheerleader, who’s authentically looking like someone from Europe.”

As for Maria’s love interest Captain von Trapp, O’Brien said the actor/singer who originated that role on Broadway in ‘59, Theo Bikel, “had all the sexual potency of a pot-bellied stove.” The Captain von Trapp here is Kevin Earley. O’Brien also made sure that Max, the music impresario, has the kind of charisma he would need to do his job or believe that he could work with Nazis. Nicholas Rodriguez plays Max as “a hot young guy who charms his way into society,” O’Brien said.

A key role in the show that O’Brien has made sure to elevate in his production is the Mother Abbess who makes it her divine duty to, as the song puts it, “solve a problem like Maria,” a novice nun in the Abbess’ order. Mother Abbess later counsels a more mature Maria to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” To O’Brien, Mother Abbess is “becoming an administrator, but she sees her younger self in Maria. I realized this was a story about two women. I suddenly thought ‘Oh, that’s what I’ve got.’” He enlisted Broadway veteran Christiane Noll to play Mother Abbess. Connecticut audiences have been fortunate to see Noll in everything from the pre-Broadway run of “Jekyll & Hyde” at the Shubert and the first national tour of “Urinetown” back in the ‘90s to TheaterWorks Hartford’s memorable production of “Next to Normal” in 2017.

“At its heart it has a real human situation,” O’Brien said of “The Sound of Music.” But he hastens to add that “there are more laughs in it now than ever before. Not because I added comedy, because there’s a lot of irony that adds to it.”

“The Sound of Music,” he continued “was created as a vehicle for Mary Martin, but it’s based on truth. A version of this story actually happened. It’s similar to a struggle we’re facing right now. It has a relevance we’re seeing now. It’s more powerful and resonant now than it was 10 years ago.”

O’Brien continues to stay active as a director in his 80s and even acted in an episode of Lisa Kudrow’s series “The Comeback” this year. Currently, the Connecticut resident has been holed up at home after slipping on the stoop at his old friend Marsha Mason’s house. He’s also working on a new book about his career — his third. As for directing, O’Brien said he’s actively involved in three new shows, presumably Broadway ones, “but I’m not at liberty to discuss them.”

As comfortable with new shows as with classics, as adept with American musicals as with Shakespeare, O’Brien finds that shows like “The Sound of Music” are “not only entertaining, they speak to you. They sing to you. You get mystically invested in them.”

“The Sound of Music” runs March 26-29 at the Shubert Theatre, 247 College St., New Haven. Performances are Thursday at 7 p.m., Friday at 1 and 7 p.m., Saturday at 1 and 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. $29.80-$104.20. shubert.com.