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. ‘Working with Julie Andrews is like getting hit over the head with a Valentine,’ he said. I imagine that when Fisher settles down into the role, she’ll make a pretty decent fist of Maria.
More mystifying is the fact that the rest of the cast are equally hopped-up. Even Ian Gelder, a wonderful actor who classes up everything he’s in, ricochets around the Palladium stage like a pinball. What’s going on? Has the director Jeremy Sams instructed everyone to perform in the same breathless style in order to conceal the fact that Connie Fisher can’t do anything else? If so, that might explain why the other Maria, as well as the actor originally earmarked to play Captain von Trapp, walked out before press night. Or has Sams directed the cast that way for purely commercial reasons? Connie Fisher may be an extremely versatile young actress who’s been told to ham it up as a one-note ingénue since that’s what fans of the TV show are expecting.
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