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FIRST NIGHT: Pure-voiced and girlish, the new Maria lacks passion
Last updated at 09:43am on 04.03.08After Connie Fisher, who leapt to instant stardom in the role of Maria, that would-be nun who wouldn't stop singing, her successor, Summer Strallen, comes as something of an anti-climax.
When Jeremy Sams's fresh-faced revival premiered in November 2006 Fisher's governess challenged and overwhelmed memories of Julie Andrews on celluloid.
Dispensing with Andrews's purified air of wholesomeness, her chilly sexual allure and humour-free jollity, Fisher offered a far more complex and engaging character.
Her quirky, far younger Maria, a bit of a rebel without a cause, viewed the weird von Trapp household with quirky amusement and the loveless children with compassionate sympathy.
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Cutain call: Summer Strallen plays The Sound Of Music's Maria
She humanised the role and kept it free of glucose sentiment.
Her at first unspoken, but passionate attraction to von Trapp gave the musical-what it had hitherto lacked - an interesting sexual dynamic.
Strallen has something of the Connie Fisher approach. Looking barely out of her teens, far too spontaneous and tom-girlish for a sacrificial life-time of Send in the Nuns, she cuts an attractive, exuberant figure, both with Margaret Preece's fine, full-throated Mother Abbess and in the von Trapp villa, which resembles a stately mansion in Robert Jones's design.
Strallen's voice, though sometimes a touch overcome by the 20-strong band, sounds pure enough for Do-Re-Mi and My Favourite Things.
Yet when she comes face to face with Simon Burke's Captain von Trapp nothing happens. For both of them it is a case of true indifference at first sight.
Burke's von Trapp, tightly buttoned in a double breasted suit and equipped with a speaking voice that sounds as if trained in the Noel Coward Academy of affected diction, suffers less from a grief that has made him a paternal martinet than an icy stiffness, a chronic arthritis of the personality.
He sings Edelweiss with a fine ardour that he never visits upon Strallen, who returns his remoteness with a dispassion of her own.
No sexual sparks fly or even take off. When Maria hears the Baron is poised for marriage her face does not fall, let alone collapse.
A crucial element of Sams's production has vanished. Admittedly the lonesome children appeal in word and song; changes of handsome scenes come with effortless ease. The Nazi menace, though, no longer looms that dangerous.
This muted Sound of Music has rather lost its cutting edge.
