The Hills Are Alive!

Contrary to the picturesque ending of The Sound of Music, the real Von Trapp family did not escape the Nazis through Austria on foot. Instead, the clan wisely took a train to Italy en route to the USA—as Frankie Johnson and Eric Thomas Johnson point out in a program note for this not-so-happily-ever-after spoof, which imagines a world in which the Von Trapps (or Van Klapps, as the show calls them) did flee through the Alps. Things go about as well as you would expect if you were to drop seven sibling rivals, a fugitive officer and a musical ex-nun into a wilderness of bears, Nazi kidnappers, hallucinatory berries and unintelligible mountain men. The children scratch out a Survivor-type existence, set to an oom-pah-pah score, while Fräulein Mathilde (Ashley Ball, deploying a perfect Julie Andrews accent) tries to get by with singing and twirling instead of food and shelter. Satiric yodeling, polkas and a trippy dream sequence ensue, inflating the show to an enjoyable but gratuitously long two hours—which, at least, is 54 minutes shorter than Rodgers and Hammerstein's original. (Visit our Fringe Festival page for more reviews, and fringenyc.org for more information.)—Amanda Angel