The show was live, but the hills and the performances were not.
I watched parts of the live Sound of Music last night on NBC and I have a few thoughts. On the one hand, I have to give props to NBC for having the audacity to do a live three hour show on television like that--especially in the age of "reality" shows. It was also ballsy to take on a beloved classic like "The Sound of Music". It was a technical achievement, and a few of the supporting characters even did a nice job.
But wow was that a steaming pile, last night.
I tweeted this about Carrie Underwood during the show: "News Report. Carrie Underwood trapped in a paper bag. Cannot act her way out."
Harsh, yes? Accurate? Absolutely. She was so wooden I could still see Gepetto's whittling marks.
And that guy from True Blood who played Captain Von Trapp? I tweeted this: "News report: Steven Moyer searches for a living person to bite in order to pump life into his performance."
He was so stiff I thought I saw a tag attached to his big toe.
The singing by those two was also very bad. Again, my heat of the moment tweet might have been a little over the top: "News report: Tornados forming above graves of both Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein." But that's honestly how I felt.
And those still weren't the worst offenses. I can take a bad performance or two (I've seen plenty of local theater--it doesn't bother me there), but I cannot take an actor portraying a scary Nazi without a German accent. You can't be a scary Nazi without a few exaggerated gutteral emissions. That's acting 101. I want my good Germans with British accents, and the bad Germans with German accents. Everyone knows that's how it's done.
I get why the casting was done the way it was. They were trying to get ratings by casting hot young stars. But one couldn't act and the other one couldn't sing. Those seem to be basic mimimum requirements.
So take my review with a grain of salt.
But you should also know that I don't like writing bad reviews because I know how much work and effort goes into writing and performing. I just can't in all good conscience praise that show last night. I was actually screaming at the television.
Here are a few other reviews...
The Daily Beast: "The Hills Are Barely Alive"
The Hollywood Reporter: They found a clutch of children who didn’t have (too much) of that child-performer pomp. And they got Carrie Underwood and Stephen Moyer to play the lovers. And, well, whoops.Because while Underwood can deliver the songs — I’m sure that anyone with the desire to plunge themselves into the American Idol ringer has been singing those songs for most of her life — she doesn’t acquit herself so well when it comes to the carrying the emotional weight of the production... Underwood nails the look of a virginal almost-nun, but goes no deeper than that. Blank stares and placid smiles...Moyer is a better singer than Russell Crowe, I’ll give him that. But...his attempt at conveying an emotional hollowness just reads as mildly constipated, his furrowed eyes and pursed lips doing all the work. He doesn’t look stoic, he just looks clenched."
Variety: "The Maria-Von Trapp relationship has its problematic aspects under the best of circumstances, and Underwood and Moyer didn’t come close to threading that needle. Given the absence of chemistry, one could be forgiven for hoping he’d lapse into “True Blood” mode and simply bite her neck."
The New York Daily News: "Underwood is a talented pop singer who obviously worked hard to learn Broadway singing on short notice. It's no reflection on her that at this point, she's not as far along as the singers who surrounded her Thursday night. Nor was this a fatal wound to the production. It made Underwood, in a strange way, almost feel like a plucky underdog. It also couldn't help coloring the show that Underwood looks so young, fresh and, well, blonde."
(That was the nicest one I found)
