On this day in New York · November 16, 1959
The Sound of Music Opens on Broadway
Mary Martin climbed every mountain at the Lunt-Fontanne while the critics argued over how much sugar a New Yorker could take, and nine months later it was the last thing Oscar Hammerstein ever wrote.
The facts
- Opening night
- November 16, 1959
- Theatre
- Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Broadway
- Stars
- Mary Martin as Maria, Theodore Bikel as Captain von Trapp
- Tony Awards
- Tied for Best Musical with Fiorello!; 5 Tonys total, including Best Actress for Martin
On November 16, 1959, Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, with Mary Martin as Maria and Theodore Bikel as Captain Georg von Trapp. It was the fifth and final show Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote together, adapted from the real Maria von Trapp's memoir of her family's escape from Nazi-annexed Austria. Opening-night reviews split hard: some critics called it the loveliest score the pair had ever written, others found it drowning in its own sweetness. New Yorkers lined up anyway, and the show ran for three and a half years and 1,443 performances. Nine months after that opening curtain, Hammerstein was dead of stomach cancer, so a nun singing about climbing every mountain turned out to be his last word on Broadway.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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strangely gentle charm that is wonderfully endearing. The Sound of Music strives for nothing in the way of smash effects, substituting instead a kind of gracious and unpretentious simplicity.
Richard Watts Jr., reviewing the opening for the New York Post, November 1959
Source: Wikipedia -
Before The Sound of Music is halfway through its promising chores it becomes not only too sweet for words but almost too sweet for music
Walter Kerr, reviewing the opening for the New York Herald Tribune, November 1959
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
It was the last curtain Rodgers and Hammerstein ever raised together, and the same score the critics fought over that night went on to become the movie every grandmother in America owns a copy of. New York gave the world's most sentimental hit its very first stage, sour reviews and all.
Sources
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