The Hall Is Alive With the Sound of Music

Here come the nuns in drag, children wearing curtains, and assorted brown paper packages tied up with string. There’s a blond-wigged, wicked Baroness, and Uncle Max, with a wry eye-pencil mustache. Off to the left stands a lonely goat without his herd. And nearby a woman with a name tag saying ME (a name she calls herself).

At the Prince Charles Cinema on a recent Sunday, the biweekly “Sing-A-Long-A-Sound of Music” is about to start. This karaoke-style “Rocky Horror”-like event offers “Sound of Music” lovers a chance to worship at the altar of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s most famously loved and cynically mocked musical without shame. If my childhood was spent giving after-dinner performances of “Edelweiss,” if I once drove from Boston to Los Angeles with just one cassette, lay-ee odl lay-ee oo-ing for 3,000 miles, if I always harbored the secret knowledge that “The Sound of Music” (1965) is the unconscious soundtrack of my life, it is on this cloudy afternoon that I come to learn: I am not alone.

Not since church have groups of strangers so unabashedly huddled together to sing their hearts out in deference to a higher power. It’s a scrappy temple, this old theater, with worn seats and a low-budget drag queen as the warmup act. The beer flows--even on Sundays--and there is candy for the children. For about $5, one can buy a “Sing-A-Long-A-Sound of Music” fun pack that contains a foam nun puppet to wave around during “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”; a “curtain headscarf”; poppers to set off at the Captain’s Ball; cough drops for hoarse throats; and a plastic sprig of edelweiss to wave slowly every time the film’s anthem comes on.

Before the show, we are told there will be subtitles (for the one or two who might not know all the words by heart) and a fancy dress contest at intermission.

“There has to be a careful balance between structure and spontaneity,” says Ben Freedman, who runs the Prince Charles. But all this flourish can’t mask the spontaneous magic of this event, in which three generations of devoted followers come to do in public what they’ve been doing in private all their lives--singing along to “The Sound of Music.”

Nevertheless, we’re instructed to hiss at the Baroness, boo the Nazis. And when we see Julie Andrews, we should yell out an exuberant “Hi, Julie!”

But when the lights dim and the camera swoops across the Alps to the tiny figure on the horizon that is our beloved heroine, the obedient “Hi, Julies” are drowned out in raucous, thrilling cheers more common at Super Bowl parties or mud-wrestling matches.

And when the camera zooms in and Julie bursts into “The hills are alive,” every person in the audience joins in, blissfully, unself-consciously. Between songs, the audience participation is pure revival meeting: When the nuns sing the line from “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”: “I’d like to say a word in her behalf . . . Maria makes me laugh.” We join in. (Ha, ha, ha!) When Maria confesses to the Reverend Mother that she was singing without permission, the crowd gasps (Oh no! Not that!). When Maria opens the gate to the Von Trapp mansion, we cheer her on (Yeah! Woo!). And when she rings the doorbell to the mansion, someone cries out, “Avon calling!”

Lest there be any confusion, this commentary is delivered with the utmost affection and respect. Still, this is London, and the audience can occasionally veer toward the naughty. In the scene in which Liesl invents an imaginary telegram to the object of her affections: “Dear Rolf. Stop. Don’t stop!” (Ooohhhhh!) And the next time Rolf comes looking for Liesl, someone shouts: “Is that a telegram in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

Audience members pop up to take bows when their namesakes appear on screen. As the rest sing heartily to “My Favorite Things,” (When the DOG bites, when the BEE stings!), the brown paper package du jour rises and takes a 360-degree bow. When the children run free in their new play clothes sewn by Maria from her old curtains, eight identically dressed girls skip and dance in the aisles.

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The “Sing-A-Long-A-Sound of Music” was introduced at London’s 1998 Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. The event’s organizer, Robin Cook, got the idea from a retirement home in Glasgow that had passed out song sheets at a screening of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

David Johnson, a theater producer responsible for the stage version of “Trainspotting,” among other productions, happened to try to buy tickets at the festival and found that it was sold out.

“I thought, ‘Oh, God, we must do something with this,’ ” Johnson recalls over a glass of wine at his members-only club Teatro, near the theater district in London.

He had ideas about marketing--fliers in gay bars for a start--and he and his business partner Richard Temple joined with Freedman of the Prince Charles Cinema, a theater that has been showing “Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the past nine years as well as other film events buffed up with music, dance and other entertainment. Freedman negotiated with 20th Century Fox for permission to screen a print of one of the studio’s highest-grossing films of all time for eight shows last August. Johnson transcribed the words from a videocassette, and the subtitles were fed onto the screen, karaoke-style. Within a few weeks, the largely gay audience was balanced out by Julie worshipers of all ages, genders and sexual orientations. It was clear they had a hit.

About that time, Johnson was contacted by the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which owns the rights to the text. Spokesman Bert Fink says he heard about the event from friends. “Bert Fink tracked me down, and I took the phone call with absolute trepidation,” Johnson says.

But Fink explained that the organization’s president, Ted Chapin, wanted to come to London to see the production. “He was the first of us to see it and he ‘got it,’ ” says Fink. “It’s irreverent, a bit off-color, raucous, but done with such affection that we gave it our blessing.”

They also got more involved, collecting a fee for use of the lyrics on screen and supervising the transcription of the subtitles--changing British to American spelling and clearing up some of the fine points by referring to the original handwritten manuscripts. While it’s arguable as to whether the subtitles are really essential, it is oddly reassuring to learn the Hammerstein-sanctioned spelling of the otherwise phonetic “yieu” (and yieu and yieu), “flibbertigibbet” or “will-o’-the-wisp,” or to know that Hammerstein intended “popping up to say coo-coo,” for the sound of the clock and not “cuckoo,” which Johnson found out the hard way while undergoing the scrutiny of Flora Griggs, who is responsible for fact-checking lyrics at the R&H; Organization. “Mr. Hammerstein had a lot of idiosyncrasies,” Griggs says by phone from New York. “We just try to make sure they are consistent.”

In January, the producers launched a tour around the U.K., where the show has been a sellout. “It becomes a local event for one or two nights,” Johnson says, adding that “people plan for weeks what they’re going to wear.” Johnson stresses that “Sing-A-Long-A-Sound of Music” is more democratic than “Rocky Horror,” which has secret rules and strict dress codes. The only rule here is that people should come ready to share the love. “I was worried at the beginning because some people are very loud and rude and can be irritating.But the noisy, more exhibitionist tendencies seem to exist very happily with those who just want to sing along because they love the show.”

What’s more, he says, any worries that he once had are now gone. “I did at the beginning start making a script of all the funniest things we’ve heard,” Johnson admits. “I was worried that on tour it might fall a bit flat and we might want to put some plants in the audience, but that hasn’t happened. It just doesn’t need it.”

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Those who are about to put the paper down to book the next flight to London should note that the producers have every intention of bringing “Sing-A-Long-A-Sound of Music” to a revival house nearer to you. “The intention is to roll out the product around the world,” Freedman says.

New York will be the next target, probably followed by a North American tour that would include Los Angeles and San Francisco. Johnson has since sold his shares to Freedman and company but will continue to receive royalties. They have been asked to hold off until after the summer release of the film on DVD--a first--and the first reissue of the film in five years. Says Fink, of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization: “It began as a grass-roots, rather innocent thing--and we are urging it to stay grass-roots.”

Fink says the organization is also concerned that the show not compete with successful stage versions, such as a long-running production in Australia. Both his organization and 20th Century Fox have shut down unsanctioned sing-along events in Ireland and Australia.

Encouraged by the show’s response and considerable worldwide media attention, Freedman hopes to expand the Sing-A-Long-A Productions empire with a similarly styled “Grease,” and says he can envision rolling out a title a year for the next decade. (Other possibilities, he says, include “Mary Poppins,” “The Jungle Book,” “My Fair Lady,” “West Side Story” and “The Wizard of Oz.”)

Johnson, for one, is “reluctant about exploiting the concept. ‘The Sound of Music’ works perfectly because it’s so camp and there’s so many ways people can dress up. Whether you like it or not, ‘The Sound of Music’ is somehow part of you. You know all the songs; you sat through the movie at least twice. I never believe people who say they’ve never seen the movie. There’s a sophisticated, ironic way of watching this movie, which is just perfect. And other movies don’t quite have it.”

Nor, perhaps, do they serve as a powerful madeleine for a time that was hopeful and simple and lovely and bittersweet, before irony ruled the day. There were numerous children and teenagers in the crowd that Sunday. When the identically dressed girls--one of whom’s mother had sewn clothes for the group from her very own curtains--were asked if they weren’t perhaps a bit too young to appreciate all the fuss, one piped up: “We love ‘The Sound of Music. It’s corny and predictable!” As a friend noted: “ ‘The Sound of Music’ sing-along show is like the most cathartic rock gig experience! There was love in the cinema last night.”

Yes, indeed. Love. When the Captain’s voice is choked with emotion in the midst of the farewell performance of “Edelweiss” at the Salzburg Festival, Maria and the children rush, singing, to his side and get their audience to join in. And at that moment, as we all sing together, strangers enveloped by the sentimental cloud, there are sniffles among the wicked and the sense of something lifting within.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the drag queen had grabbed the mike and instructed us to join hands with the people next to us at that moment. But something greater had taken over; no instructions were needed. The teary-eyed woman to my right cradled her darling daughter in her lap as they earnestly sang along to “Edelweiss.” The sweatshirt-wearing, camera-toting man to my left choked out his atonal, half-spoken rendition of the lyrics, but it didn’t grate one bit. And at the end, when Maria and her brood set off to cross the Alps to wait out the injustice of war, when love conquers all and hope waits on the horizon, my neighbor leaned over and kissed his wife.