NEWSPAPER
PRIOR OPENING
By Christine Sams
IT'S a long way from Mount Thomas police station to the snowy peaks of Austria, but Lisa McCune is alive with the sound of music.
The popular star of Blue Heelers is gearing up for her Sydney theatre debut in the stage version of The Sound Of Music.
McCune, of course, is playing lead character Maria, in the role made famous by Julie Andrews on the big screen.
It is less than a week before previews for The Sound Of Music begin in the Lyric Theatre at Star City, but McCune is calm about singing her way into the hearts of theatre audiences.
"It has been hard work, but such fun, and I cannot wait until it opens," she said.
Although she is best-known for her TV role as Maggie Doyle, McCune has been classically trained as a singer and recently performed to critical acclaim in a concert version of She Loves Me in Melbourne.
In her Sydney stage debut, she stars opposite John Waters as Captain Von Trapp and alongside cast members including June Salter, Bert Newton and Tim Draxl.
Amid the hectic buzz of rehearsals, McCune admitted her soft spot for the young Australian children chosen to play the much-loved Von Trapp family.
"I'm enjoying working with this great cast, and particularly the children, who are so incredibly talented," she said.
The musical version of The Sound of Music is based on the true story of the Von Trapp family who were forced to flee Austria at the outbreak of World War II.
The Australian show has been shaped under the careful eye of renowned Broadway director Susan H Schulman.
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SYDNEY OPENING
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD - NOVEMBER 1999
Enchanting revival strikes a chord
Reviewed by Bryce Hallett
It is almost 40 years to the day that Rodgers and Hammerstein II's blend of drama and song The Sound of Music opened on Broadway and director Susan Schulman's revival is as enchanting as audiences might hope for.
Based in part on Maria von Trapp's autobiographical book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, the musical, especially Robert Wise's 1965 film, continues to strike a chord with audiences. It's not hard to appreciate why.
For all its sentimentality, the romantic quest journey is not all plain sailing and Schulman's clever direction accentuates the musical's fairytale qualities without leaving the propaganda and encroaching perils of fascist rule out of its frame. The sumptuous designs of Heidi Ettinger are delicate and fantastic, giving rise to a realm akin to Disney's Beauty and The Beast where ever-present dangers tear at dreams.
Schulman draws out engaging performances, particularly from the children, and employs appropriately bold touches in Act II when the von Trapps escape the "spider web" of the Nazi's and flee across the Alps. The orchestration is richly textured and the melodic songs, with their pithy lyrics, run high on emotion without losing the story's logic and drive.
Like Streisand in Funny Girl, Julie Andrews' ebullience in The Sound of Music has defined the role. Inevitably, comparisons will be made. As the postulent Maria Rainer, Lisa McCune rises splendidly to the challenge. It takes a skilful, charismatic actor to even begin to make the soul-searching Cinderella character their own. McCune, one of the country's most versatile talents, invests Maria with a familiar spirited warmth but with sufficient strength of character and will to deepen what at first appears an impossibly idealistic heroine.
John Water's authoritative, somewhat sullen, Captain Georg von Trapp arrives as he should: on his majestic "ship" - or at least that's how the arch-windowed mansion first looks - a palace of sorts where he snappily presides over the duty-bound housekeeper Frau Schmidt (June Salter), butler Franz (James Wright), and his seven "obedient" children.
Salter is appealingly deadpan; Bert Newton is well-cast as the blustery entrepreneur wag Max Detweiler, although too hammy and not shrewd enough just yet. In his stage musical debut, Tim Draxl equips himself well as Rolf, who turns out to be less the traitor than the more suspenseful film would have us believe.
As Mother Abbess, Eilene Hannan is superb. There is very good work, too, from Cindy Pritchard and Pia Morley. Musical director Peter Casey ensures a brisk pace and the acoustic is generally clear and bright. But it's Schulman's splendid staging and the magnificent McCune who elevates what is bound to prove and enormously popular family show.
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THE AUSTRALIAN - NOVEMBER 1999
The hills are alive with local talent
Reviewed by John McCallum
A DELIGHTFUL young trainee nun is sent from her abbey to be governess to seven children who need love and fun in their strictly drilled lives. She provides both and fall in love with their stern, repressed father. She teaches them to sing (you begin with do-re-mi) and takes them for walks in the mountains. The growing Nazi menace threatens their alpine happiness…Stop me if you've heard this before.
In most theatrical genres other than musicals, the creative team - the directors and the designers - are expected to have something to say in the way they interpret the original and put their stamp on it. Commercial musicals are not interpreted but revived, like cardiac patients. The New York Outer Critics Circle Awards has a category just for outstanding revival of a musical; and an earlier version of this production of The Sound of Music won it.
You can see why. This is a very attractive theatrical product. Director Susan Schulman and designer Heidi Ettinger have more or less ignored the film and gone back to the source of a strory that is much loved for good reasons. I has great characters, a fine plot, plenty of emotion, astirring theme and not too much politics, considering that it is set during the rise of fascism. It also has, of course, some of the best known songs of the past 40 years of popular entertainment.
Schulman's direction is highly threatical and conventionally mannered in appearance. Ettinger's set celebrates the man-made grandeur of the abbey and the natural grandeur of the Alps and finds some excitement in the contrast between them. The abbey is a vast, dark cavern, of columns that transforms spectacularly into the hills that loom above Captain von Trapp's luxurious little island of a home. Sometimes these hills are light, friendly and full of edelweiss, and sometime they are dark, frightening, and full of storm clouds. Paul Gallo's lighting contributes to some very spectacular weather effects.
What is not imported in this show is the Australian company, led by John Waters and Lisa McCune. A director who was trying to do more than a reconstruction of a revival might have done more with a cast of this calibre.
Waters, as von Trapp, is reserved and dignified. He lets his fine singing do the work of revealing the current of strong emotion and conviction that runs under von Trapp's austere public mask. The result is very effective.
Eilene Hannan's abess, June Salter's Frau Schmidt, and Anne Wood's Elsa are all very strong, especially Hannan, when she is backed by her chorus of quirky but full-voiced nuns. Bert Newton, a fine television personality but not an actor, is terrible as Detweiler. He seems to have wandered in from some Christmas panto.
Pia Morley and Tim Draxl are appealing as Liesl von Trapp and her young lover Rolf, the bright fresh-faced lad with the swastika on his sleeve. The von Trapp children are disciplined and charming as they sing and dance their way through the well-known numbers.
But just as you don't take on Hamlet with a Prince of Denmark, you don't take on The Sound of Music without a Maria to whom the audience's hear goes out, and in Lisa McCune they have found one. She is ebullient and lively, definitely a star. She has all the freshness and openness of Julie Andrews but much more personality. She plays here within the constraints of a commercial production that aims to recreate for fans something of the spirit of the original, and she does it superbly.
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SUNDAY TELEGRAPH - 14 NOVEMBER 1999
A treat for the senses
From the minute Maria leaps over a fence and runs towards the audience singing The Hills Are Alive, the show comes alive.
She is the right combination of pert, pretty and proper - with a voice as well.
As so The Sound of Music hits town, a much-loved show in a production that veers towards the lavish without overdoing it.
It is almost impossible not to like this show - the music has become part of our lives, the story a fable, and the deft blend of comedy and drama adding up to a classic night of entertainment.
It is, if one were cynical, one of the classiest pieces of theatrical trickery ever: it grafts on to the classic Broadway musical a real-life story, a bit of religion, Austrian culture and history without ever shaking its song-and-dance fundamentals.
Maria, the novice who enjoys singing and wandering about on the mountains surrounding the convent, is not fitting in well and so she is sent to be governess for the seven children of the widowed Captain Von Trapp.
Von Trapp (John Waters) is a surly martinet, treating his children and staff like naval ratings.
But Maria has different ideas about child-rearing, and before long, the children are singing, dancing and enjoying themselves.
This trimmed-down stage version (as distance from the much-loved and universal film) sadly pares most of the characters to the minimum, accenting that old adage about appearing with children on stage.
Even Von Trapp, in the end, gets very little to do other than sing and dance and accompany the children (though he does have the memorable like after being given the Nazi salute: "I am an Austrian; I will not be heiled.")
So with Maria and the children centre stage, the show rolls along, eminently enjoyable, a treat for its thousands of fans and a polished production that cuts to the chase (perhaps too quickly at times).
There are a couple of songs that are not found in the film - the cheerfully cynical song between the agent Max Detweiler (Bert Newton) and the fiancee Elsa Schrader (Anne Wood) was especially fun as they look at the horror of two lovers with money in How Can Love Survive ("trapped by our capital gains are we, how can love survive?").
The classic hits are performed with, at the least, due diligence and at the best, flair and sparkle.
I Am Sixteen (Going on Seventeen) saw the talented pair of Tim Draxl and Pia Morley stepping out with considerable style.
But the wedding scene which dissolves from a nicely balanced polyphonic nuns' chorus to a reprise of How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria is liable to promote giggles rather than awe. (You solve the problem by marrying her off, is the obvious answer, feminism notwithstanding.)
A find stage design by Heidi Ettinger blends spectacle with efficiency, and the music (under musical director Peter Casey) is as smooth and fitting as can be expected.
And the stars, in the end, were McCune and the children, who delivered everything and sometimes more than could be hoped for.
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THE AGE - JULY 11 2000
Sound of Music off to Brisbane
In the 'Performing Arts' column by Suzanne Brown
THE Sound of Music
closes this weekend after a record-breaking season. According to producer John Frost, it is the most successful show he and SEL's James Erskine have produced together. The Sound of Music played to a 96-per-cent capacity with box office takings in Melbourne in excess of $11 million. The production moves to Brisbane with Lisa McCune still in the lead, although the whisper is that Rachael Beck is waiting in the wings to take over the role. Beck has appeared on television and stage, her musical credits including Les Miserables and Cats, and most recently performed in the Production Company's Call Me Madam. Frost and SEL's next Melbourne production is Annie, which opens in February next year.********************
THE AGE - JULY 28 2000
Sound of Music star pulls out
The Sound of Music star John Waters has pulled out of the Brisbane season of the musical less than a week before opening night.
Sound of Music producer Tony Cochrane today said Waters had been forced to withdraw from the musical for health reasons.
Phantom of the Opera star Rob Guest, who will replace Waters as Captain Von Trapp opposite former Blue Heelers star Lisa McCune, joined the cast for rehearsals today.
In a statement released this afternoon, Mr Cochrane said previews of the musical, featuring Bert Newton and June Salter, would begin tomorrow at Brisbane's Lyric Theatre.
The Brisbane season of The Sound of Music will begin as advertised next Thursday.
Mr Cochrane said Waters' contribution to the show had been outstanding, but his health was more important.
'We wish him a speedy and full recovery,' he said.
Sound of Music spokesman John Frost later said Waters had told the show's producers yesterday he was suffering from exhaustion.
'It's been coming along for a while,' Mr Frost told AAP.
'He came to us yesterday and he said 'it's not fair for you guys, it's not fair for the cast and it's not fair for the audience for me to go on'.'
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WESTERN AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPER - EARLY OCTOBER 2000
Guest of honour
By Ron Banks
ROB GUEST just happened to be between jobs when the call came from the producers of The Sound of Music.
John Waters had fallen ill and was withdrawing from the show. Was Guest available to take the key role of Captain Georg von Trapp, the Austrian naval officer who founded a musical dynasty with his extensive brood of children?
Guest had finished his seasons in Brisbane and Sydney of the musical Jolson and plans to take the show to Melbourne were still on hold.
So, yes, he would be happy to take his first role in a Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical.
There was just one catch, though: there would be only four days to learn the songs and dialogue before the opening of the Brisbane season.
"Fortunately, there aren't so many songs for Von Trapp, although the acting part is very strong," said Guest in a break from rehearsals at the Burswood Theatre, where the show opens tomorrow night.
"With only four days to go, I ate, slept and drank The Sound of Music."
That was two months ago and he now has 65 shows in Brisbane under his belt in preparation for the Perth season, although this time he will play opposite a new Maria. Rachael Beck replaces Lisa McCune, who left to pursue other opportunities.
For Guest, a new leading woman means certain readjustments to the playing style as the pair learn how to develop their own on-stage relationship.
"There will be differences in playing with Rachael but God forbid that any two actresses should play the role in the same way," Guest says.
"Both Rachael and Lisa are wonderful actresses and it's a great privilege to work with them."
Guest is familiar with changing his leading ladies, of course, having worked opposite quite a few in his six and half years in The Phantom of the Opera and then Les Miserables, the two musicals with which he has been most closely associated over the past decade.
His most recent appearance in Perth was in April last year when he appeared as Jean Valjean in the final season of Les Miserables.
It brought to an end an extended relationship with the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude-Michel Schonberg, the composer of Les Mis.
So it was not surprising that his decision to follow that with the lead role in Jolson, the story of entertainer Al Jolson, was a change of pace for the man best known for the blockbusters.
Jolson, written by Englishman Rob Bettenson, was originally a British-Canadian production that had never seen the lights of Broadway.
"Jolson was probably more of a career gamble than any of my other roles," Guest says. "But I got the chance to play a great character whose life was in many ways tragic, despite his many achievements."
Playing Jolson and von Trapp are the latest in a long line of roles since Guest's career in music theatre began 30 years ago in his native Auckland, New Zealand.
He recalls that his first musical in New Zealand was Man of Sorrows, one of the many stories of the birth of Christ that grew out of the success of such musicals as Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell in the early 70s.
Although Guest performed Man of Sorrows only in New Zealand, the Australian connection was already beginning.
Man of Sorrows was written by the Australian couple Enzo Toppano and Peggy Mortimer, the husband and wife team whose daughter, Peta Toppano, would also make a name for herself on stage and television.
In his early days as a singer in a rock band, Guest had taken the almost mandatory trips to Australia, but it was not until he was invited to perform in the original Australian production of Les Miserables in 1988 that he set up permanent home in this country.
He remains popular in New Zealand through touring his shows and the odd "guest" spot on New Zealand television and stage.
Perhaps the ultimate accolade occurred when New Zealand television made him the subject of an episode of its This is Your Life series.
Appearing on the show firmed his decision to write his autobiography, which will be published in New Zealand in March.
His wife, Judy Barnes, is a singer whom Guest met when they were both young performers in New Zealand. She still sings professionally, and their two children, aged 11 and nine, are already keen on show business.
The Sound of Music is previewing this week and opens at the Burswood Theatre tomorrow.
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SUNDAY MAIL - OCTOBER 15
Sound of Success
FESTIVAL Theatre will be alive with the Sound of Music in the New Year and Bass counter bookings for the new $6 million production open on Monday week.
Full details of the January season will be unveiled tomorrow, along with casting of the young South Australians to play the von Trapp children alongside stars Rob Guest, Rachael beck and Bert Newton.
The show has broken all box office records in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and it's no * wonder.
When The Sound of Music has its world premiere on Broadway in 1959, the show has advance bookings of more than $2m - about $30m in today's money - and the top price was just $5.
The show went onto run for more than 1500 performances and won eight Tony Awards including Best Musical.
* The word that is there was not the word used. A word mistake was used in the sentence structure. The original word was: small.
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THE ADVERTISER -OCTOBER 17
Waiting in wings almost over the newest Von Trapps
By Susan Archdall
THE Adelaide youngsters who form the children's cast of The Sound of Music are overflowing with excitement.
But they can bank on their on-stage mother, Melbourne actress Rachael Beck, being a steadying influence.
Beck, who plays the lead role of Maria in the musical which opens at the Festival Theatre on January 4, knows exactly how they feel.
She was just 15 when she got her start on the stage, making her debut as Rumpleteazer in the musical Cats.
Since then she has appeared in television's Hey Dad and on stage as Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Fantine in Les Miserables and Sally in Me and My Girl.
The 12 young performers who will share the roles of the six younger Von Trapp children and six swings (fill-ins), were named yesterday. The eldest sister will be played by Sydney actress Pia Morley.
"I know exactly what they're going through but I tell you what, it's a lot of fun," Beck said.
"But you know, Rob and I are both watching out for them, helping them through any difficulties or nervousness they might have.
"They will be fine. They seem really lively anyway - quick to pick up things."
Beck, who is now performing in the musical in Perth, took over the lead role of Maria from Lisa McCune after the Brisbane season. She and Guest, who plays Captain Von Trapp, met their on-stage children - ranging in age from six to 13 - for the first time yesterday.
Benita Grimaldi, 11, of Mytrle Bank, who will play Louisa, is looking forward to meeting "more people and making more friends."
Sarah Spavan, 11, of Adelaide, who will play the role of Brigetta, said: "It's really good because most kids don’t get to do this stuff; we just happened to be there at the right time."
Five weeks of rehearsals for the show start on November 27. But the time the Adelaide season opens the company will have worked with about 80 children around Australia, in seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.
Also appearing in the Adelaide production are distinguished opera singer Joan Carden as the Mother Abbess, screen and stage actor Rowena Wallace as Frau Schmidt and Queensland performer Sean Mulligan as Rolf.
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