THE SOUND OF MUSIC
Civic Center Amphitheatre, 2021
By Rodgers and Hammerstein
Music Direction: Emma Weiss
Choreography: Jennifer Lott, Brent Whitney
Set Design: Edward Morris
Light Design: Brian Elston
Costume Design: Noel Hunzinger
Sound: Maria Ulrich
Props: Elise Curtis
Featuring: Maya Lagerstam, Danielle Troiano, Max DeTonge, Ann Delaney, Arielle Leverett, Trey DeLuna, Daniel Rosales, Hallie Snowday, Lily Jenkins, Wren Walter, Gus Baldyga, Millie Kohler, Phoebe Walter, Noah Durham Fried, Rocheny Princien, Jackson Gifford, Lindsay Gross, Mackenzie Holley
Selections from POV:
In the summer of 2018, my three year old daughter Scout got a fever that wouldn’t let up. This was a nuisance because my husband and I both were producing and/or participating in different productions, busy and we had no sitters for our other son who was one. Blink and a week later Scout is in the PICU; hours away from home, transferred by ambulance, the most critical patient in the children’s hospital. She was on ventilation and under sedation with multiple central lines. We knew it was cancer the second the hematology doctors stopped entering without masks. We knew it was lymphoma by secretly decoding her chart on the wall. No big deal, we told ourselves– as we held court with the teams of doctors rounding– as long as it hasn’t spread, this is doable.
The evening we were sat down by the lead oncologists, a heat-wave swept into Michigan. The cancer had spread to multiple parts of her body and her bone marrow; her organs were failing and she would need to stay under sedation. Stage four, the doctors said. The heat-wave was heralded in by a thunderstorm so epic, tables were tossed across the street.
I believe in nothing. I believe in the moment: the way we live, think and act is my only idea of spirituality- and even those values I’m not too great at upholding. It was during that thunderstorm– tables tossed across the road, glass breaking (very November Rain)– that I considered the idea of god.
My conception in that storm was more of a root physiological dread. I could conceive, for the first time, an old testament version of a god who destroyed without care or thought; a god who took what you thought you were entitled to; a god who brought on the bubonic plague; a god of killing fields and locusts. While the heatwave hovered for a month, I slapped away the chaplains, briskly protecting the room from snakeoil they were selling. But something in me changed the night of that thunderstorm.
I’m now afraid.
Given the circumstances of history, The Sound of Music is a classic play about terror– and therefore faith. Faith and terror; they historically go hand in hand, despite my entitled secular world view. I have spent months dodging the religiosity of Maria von Trapp’s story, soured by the endless saccharine passages in her memoir about God’s Love. But, there it is, every page turned: broken down, this is a play about a rebel who follows her faith to heal, unite and ultimately save her family.
Therefore, friends, stand by me as I, a director without faith (but a woman with a lot of fear), lean in to tell this story about god. Let’s start at the very beginning.
