Echoes from The Sound of Music

There’s been a bit of an uproar lately with country/pop/American Idol star Carrie Underwood tackling the role of Maria in a televised stage version of “Sound of Music” This has generated such a dialogue among fans, and unfortunately hate tweets for Carrie.

“The Sound of Music” is such a culturally iconic movie and it has a sense of sacredness about it. It’s not just in the US, but globally.

• If at any time someone needs to depict the most uplifting and positive portrayal of Hollywood, flash to Maria spinning her skirts to the “Hills are Alive” with that amazing pan of the open space.  
• In Arundhati Roy’s “God of Small Things,” the main characters are at a viewing of the movie when a critical event occurs. I always remember how Maria and the children were described having “peppermint voices” in contrast to the harsh realities for the characters in the book.

• We sang the songs in school, learned about Rogers & Hammerstein in music classes. Now that I’m thinking about it, I had done a report in elementary school on Rogers & Hammerstein and sketched the scenes from the movie.  My father had the double record album and there were movie stills and as a child, I gazed at this forever wondering about the Von Trapp children. I wonder how many future puppeteers were inspired by this movie.

We visited Austria years ago by car from Germany. We drove through beautiful landscapes and we gasped at the breathtaking mountains. I kept gushing “Wow, I feel like I’m in the Sound of Music.” When we arrived in Salzburg, Austria, we hit the Sound of Music mecca. I had forgotten that Salzburg is where the story took place and the movie captured all of the local elements. There was church, the gardens, the mountains.. and Salzburg knows this. They offer full and half day tours to see all the sites where the movie was filmed. 

While walking around the town, I came across small beautiful flowers along a hedge. I realized they were Edelweiss, clean and white. I took few steps further and entered the garden of the Dwarves. I started telling my husband, “This is it! this is it! This is where the kids marched and stepped to the top of the staircase!” It was like I had been there in a previous life.

When my daughter was 3 years old, I thought it’d be fun to play this movie for her alongside the TeleTubbies and Disney movies. She loved it so much that she wanted to watch it every day for 3 weeks. Every. Day. For three weeks. Let that sink in.

The first few times, we would sit  to watch, and friends would walk in and sit down too. When we got tired, she threw tantrums. She wanted specific scenes.  She kept crying “when he has a haircut!” and I replied no one gets haircuts.  We realized that when Maria first enters the house to meet the children, my daughter thought it was the father (with a haircut) who opened the door, not realizing it was the butler. Once we drove by an old cathedral in NY and she asked if Maria was there. When she was about 6 or so, we went to see a local stage production. During the show, when Maria and Captain came back from their honeymoon, she asked if Maria had “a baby in her tummy now.” Yes, SOM raises other family issues we never thought about.

One thing I noticed during our 3 week SOM marathon, the children in the movie acted extremely well. They were crisp in their delivery, and even when there was no dialogue, their expressions were on target. The story is very tight, and the music is absolutely creative, which make this film so durable.

Question on the Plot

I do have one qualm with the overall storyline. The youngest child is 5 years old, which means the mother had died at the most 5 years prior. We understand the father has issues resolving his grief and opted for repression and denial as coping mechanism. Other than the 2 younger children (aged 5 and 7), everyone should have reasonable memories of mother and the happier times when the house was full of music. It seems they all just erased the mother. Of course it's cleaner to remove the references to mother, and let Maria step forward without handling baggage of the previous relationship. Otherwise, this turns into an issue of “Nannies Gone Wild.”