Desperately seeking stardom

Connie Fisher, the winner of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s search-for-a-star reality TV show, hits the ground running in The Sound of Music. Indeed, she’s so high energy, it’s as if she’s starring in an infomercial rather than a West End musical. She overdoes everything, right down to the smallest hand gesture. As contestants in reality shows are fond of saying, she gives it ‘one hundred and ten per cent’.

I imagine this is exactly what Lloyd Webber was hoping for when he came up with How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? Fisher is a non-professional who has been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so, of course, she’s going to act her socks off — and it more or less works because she’s playing a character who desperately wants to be liked. Even the great Julie Andrews overdid it a bit, as Christopher Plummer pointed out after co-starring with her in the 1965 film.