TV provided the first Maria for Jeremy Sams’ revival of Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s delectably twee nuns-and-Nazis confection. And now the
small screen has provided the second, this time by slightly more
devious means. If you thought Connie Fisher had it bad auditioning for
millions week in, week out, pity her poor replacement, Summer Strallen,
who’s been made to appear in ‘Hollyoaks’ for the past six months,
playing a wannabe entertainer who persuades Andrew Lloyd Webber to cast
her as the new Maria. That’s no way to treat a star!
Though
still in her early twenties, Strallen is already a tried-and-tested
musical theatre pro, as she demonstrated in her Olivier Award-nominated
turn in ‘The Drowsy Chaperone’ last year. She has a winning comic
presence and a notably pure voice: she does all the ‘Raindrops on
roses’ and ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer’ stuff very passably here.
There’s not a lot of sexual chemistry between her tomboyish Maria and
Simon Burke’s icy Captain von Trapp, but they’ve already got seven
children to look after, so perhaps that’s just as well. Margaret Preece
makes a commandingly operatic Mother Abbess – she even half-sings her
spoken lines. But it’s Robert Jones’s gargantuan sets that are the real
stars – you’ve got to be quite a performer to upstage mountains.
1 comment
The musical is cool