This year’s Oscars ceremony was, by all accounts, a letdown. But I confess to enjoying Lady Gaga’s medley from “The Sound of Music,” and Julie Andrews gave the evening something it’s lacked for ye🍸ars — the elegance of olܫd Hollywood.
We’ll be hearing a lot in the coming weeks about “The Sound of Music,” which turns 50 in March and has grossed something like $1.5 billion. So it’s a good time to read “The Sound of Music Story,” Tom Santopietro>’s excellent behind-the-s🃏cenes account of a phenomenon that, despite critics who hate nuns and children, seems destined to delight audiences “for a thousand years.”
Santopietro, a stage manager when he’s not at his computer, opens his book with a short, juicy bio of the real Maria von Trapp. Spiky, ambitious and blunt, she comes off more like Elaine Stritch than Julie Andrews. She was delighted with the money that came in from the movie, but appalled at the liberties director Robert Wise took with geography — the Al♏pine peaks the von Trapps climb over on screen would have led them to Obersalzberg, Hitler’s mountain retreat.
“Don’t they know geography in Hollywood?” von Trapp snap𓂃ped. “Salzburg does not border on Switz🌞erland!”
Wise replie🍎d: “In Hollywood you make your😼 own geography.”
“The Sound of Music” was, of course, a Broadway sh𓆉ow before it was a movie. Producer Richard Halliday originally conceived of it as a play (with folk songs) for his wife, Mary Martin. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse were set 𒀰to work adapting it for the stage, under the working title “The Singing Heart.”
Halliday asked Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to write a song for it. But they had a better idea: W🌞hy not do a full-fledged musical? 🉐Their famous score overshadowed Lindsay and Crouse’s script.
Like Maria von Trapp, Lindsay and Crou♈se enjoyed the money, but bristled at the lack of recognition. “Is it immodest of me to point out, because no one else ever does,” Lindsay wrဣote the Times, “that Russel Crouse and I had a hand in it?”
(Years later, when ꦚAndrews’ co-star Christopher Plummer said that anyone could have written about nuns and children and had a hit, Crouse snapped: “I wonder why nobody ever did?”)
Santopietro won access to Hammerstein’s manuscripts, and he does a first-rate job of analyzing his creative procಌess. “The hillside is sweet . . . with summer music” became “T🍷he hills are alive with the sound of music.”
Hammerstein agonized over every word. Rodgers, meanwhile, sat at the piano for about 15 minutes and knocked out a tune. As Rodgers on💝ce noted, “I can pee a melody.”
Though some critics practically threw up when they heard about “whiskers on kittens,” Santopietro makes a strong case that the score t𒅌o “The Sound of Music” is one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s best.
Switching the scene to Hollywood, Santopietro offers a trove of anecdotes about the movie. I won’t reveal them here, with one exception: The original director, the cynical William Wyler, wanted to make a stridently anti-wa🥀r movie, with scenes of German tanks rolling into Austria. His only problem? What to do wಞith all that music.
“The people in this musical are playing a scene and all of sudden someone starts singing,” he no🥀ted. “Why the hell do they start singing?”
Details like that make “The Sound of Music Story” a good way to celebrate the musical we all (come on, admit it!) know by he🍃art.