Director Jack O'Brien has reimagined the Broadway classic ‘The Sound of Music'
San Diegans know and love Jack O’Brien for the 25 years he spent as artistic director of The Old Globe theater in Balboa Park.
But the four-time Tony-winning director is also a much-in-demand national stage director, who at 86 is showing no signs of slowing down. In a phone interview last week, the Connecticut-based O’Brien talked about three plays he’s now workshopping for the stage and his recent screen acting debut as Lisa Kudrow’s stylist “Tommy” in the final season of her HBO series “The Comeback.”
“They gave me great stuff to do,” he said of his “Comeback” experience. “People are saying how much they enjoyed (me in) it. I'm a director and look at this and don't know what they're talking about. But I guess when you sit across the table from the greatest talent in the world for 40-plus years, you learn a thing or two.”
One of O’Brien’s longest-term stage projects of late has been his reimagining of the 1959 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music.”
He first tackled the based-on-fact musical about the Austrian novitiate Maria - who marries into the von Trapp family during the 1938 Anschluss - in an acclaimed 2015 production.
He added back in songs cut from the original score for the better-known 1965 film, deepened the relationships and backgrounds of the characters, made Maria younger, added in more romance and made the rise of Nazi power in Austria more ominous.
“You have the makings of a lot of material here that no one had paid attention to for 60 years,” he said. “It was like literally waking Sleeping Beauty.”
Last year, O’Brien returned to “The Sound of Music” for a second directorial interpretation, saying he still had “layers of the onion to peel” to reach the musical’s essential truth.
“I think what I realized is that 10 years ago we didn't really finish it,” he said. “It was an excavation, and the minute you start asking questions you have to come up with the right answers.”
The new production debuted last September at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It’s now on tour, with a San Diego engagement opening Tuesday, May 26, at the Civic Theatre. The show has been selling out wherever it goes and reviews have been stellar.
O’Brien said producers are so encouraged by its success, they’re planning to extend the tour for another two years.
“You know why it’s doing so well?” he asked. “People can take their children. Why are we doing this work if we’re not doing it for another generation of people to fall in love with theater.”
O’Brien talked to the Union-Tribune about “The Sound of Music” on May 15. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: I read that you saw the original Broadway production of “The Sound of Music” with Mary Martin in the role of Maria when you were in college. What do you remember about it?
A: It was between my junior and senior years in college. There are interesting things in the early part of your life that are decisive, like exquisite scars, and you never forget them. That shifted something in me. I remember (Martin) coming straight downstage to sing “Something Good” with no microphone. She had this astonishing voice. She was 44 and was playing a novitiate who is 18 or 19.
Q: When you first started working on “The Sound of Music,” you did a lot of research into the history of the period and the real-life von Trapp family, who escaped Austria and lived out their lives in America. What was the process like of breaking the show open and putting it back together again?
A: You have to make a choice. As a 60-year old dowager gets the paint scraped off of her, suddenly she's brand new again,” he said. “In my heart I was chasing the truth. I didn't feel I was interfering. I feel I was listening. That's what came out of it. I'm as proud of this as anything I've ever done.”
Q: You’ve heightened the romance and intentionally cast younger actors to play Maria and Georg than the original actors on Broadway or in the 1965 film.
A: In the original version of the wedding scene, I remember Mary Martin walked behind a scrim in a wedding dress. That was it. So I took a chunk of material and created the wedding. I wanted to see a young virgin girl at 18 see for the first time the dress her fellow nuns had made for her. I wanted to trace her through their farewells, through the wedding, to meeting Mother Abbess who meets the groom for first time. Then the children celebrating, then her husband taking her to the bedroom. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever done.
Q: Can you talk about how you deepened the musical’s characters to give them more authenticity, starting with the stern Navy Capt. Georg von Trapp?
A: Here's a young man who married his sweetheart. She had seven children and obviously died in childbirth. Of course he blamed himself. He shut himself down, denied everything and punished himself the way stupid people do.
Q: How about his eldest daughter Liesel and her sweetheart Rolf?
A: Why does Liesel make a fool of herself over this paperboy? She was 10 when her mother died and went through puberty in the hands of an Austrian nanny who knows nothing about sex and even less about love. Then I thought about what will I do with this goofy love song “16 Going on 17”? Usually young Rolf is portrayed as a baby Nazi. But what if he were just the kid in the neighborhood your mom didn't want you to play with? What if he reeked of teen sex? And the fact that he was persona non grata without portfolio and had no one to take care of him? That's who these cults pick up. He starts out as a cute paperboy and ends up as a killer.
Q: You’ve put a lot of thought into the role of Maria’s mentor at the convent, the Mother Abbess.
A: There were a lot of reasons girls went into convents back then. They were children born out of wedlock, there was a family failure or it was for family prestige. With Mother Abbess, perhaps the older Mother Abbess died and she was a young woman with a head for business and she was good at the job.
When we get to the scene at the end of the first act where the young girl from the neighborhood (Maria) has failed, she comes in and admits she has transgressed, the Mother Abbess says “you need to find your life.” Usually she goes right in the song (“Climb Ev’ry Mountain”). But instead I have her start the song by speaking the first lines. As the song begins to speak to you, you realize you’ve never made your covenant with God.
For me, its really a story of two women, Maria and the Mother Abbess. They’re both from the same neighborhood. They both went into the convent. There’s one of them who stays and there’s one who got out.
It’s a rich tapestry. It just keeps talking to me. I never get tired of it.
‘The Sound of Music’
When: 7 p.m. May 26 and 27; 7:30 p.m. May 28 and 29; 2 and 7:30 p.m. May 30; 1 and 6:30 p.m. May 31
Where: San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Third Ave., downtown
Tickets: $52.25-$351
Online:broadwaysd.com
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