Houma is alive with the ‘Sound of Music’

MIKE BROSSETTE

A yodeling herdsman! Unhappy Nazis! Edelweiss! A conflicted nun-in-training! What else could it be but “The Sound of Music?”

Le Petit Theater de Terrebonne on Houma’s Main Street is presenting the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Tuesday, July 22, to Sunday July 27, and Tuesday, July 29, to Sunday, Aug. 3. All shows are at 7:30 p.m., except the Sunday matinees at 2 p.m.

Reservations are required. Admission is $12 for non-members.

Enthusiasm about Le Petit’s summer musical has been strong. Seventy-five people auditioned for the two-hour production, which has roles for seven children.

And director Pat Crochet is promising that though none of the Nazis sing, the nuns certainly do.

“We couldn’t have too many nuns because of the size of the stage,” Crochet said, “so some of their voices had to be prerecorded.”

Audiences will hear several ditties that have landed in the popular songbook: “Do-Re-Mi,” My Favorite Things,” “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” and the title tune.

Many of the lines in the children’s songs are spoken. All the kids have stage experience, Crochet said, and most have seen the 1965 movie version. She said the kids have been practicing trilling for the yodeling parts in “The Lonely Goatherd,” one of the production’s better-known songs.

The Broadway “Sound of Music” opened in 1959 and ran for 1,443 performances. The movie won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actress (Julie Andrews), among other awards.

In the Houma production, Doug Holloway (last seen in Le Petit’s “Horowitz and Mrs. Washington” this year) plays Captain von Trapp, an affianced Austrian navy man opposed to the Nazis prior to the outbreak of World War II. His method of raising his kids with navy-style discipline is put to the test when whimsical apprentice nun Maria (Jillian Vedros, last seen in the theater’s “Waiting in the Wings”) is sent by her order to tend his children. The nuns suspect she’s not quite like the other novices.

Maria is a hit with the kids and becomes a bigger hit with the formal-mannered captain, realizing she may have a hankering for domesticity.

The theater production differs from the film a bit, said Crochet, who undertook the production’s choreography with Vedros, Terrebonne Parish schools’ talented theater instructor. No puppet show is presented for “The Lonely Goatherd” and the children do not participate in singing “My Favorite Things.” Some of the same songs from the movie are sung by different characters in the theater production.

Dwayne Adams (last seen in “Perfect Wedding”) and Jay Bellanger (“Horowitz”) play the Nazis Herr Zeller and Admiral Schreiber in the Houma staging.

The nuns are portrayed by Kim Bellamy (Mother Abbess); Mary LaPlume (Sister Berthe, mistress of novices); Renata Self (Sister Marguetta), and Rosalyn Chauvin (Sister Sophia).

The children are played by Arielle Domingue (Liesl); Ethan Rodrigue (Friedrich); Dayla Rich (Louisa); Michael Carlos (Kurt); Cristina Samanie (Brigitta); Katie Davis (Marta), and Sophia Robichaux (Gretel).

Others in the cast are Hunter Brown (loyalist telegram boy Rolf); Tami Roche Ledet (Captain von Trapp’s fiancée Elsa Schraeder); Dillon Hughes (the butler Franz); Catherine Chaisson (Frau Schmitt) and Michael Gros (Max Detweiler).

To reserve seats, call (985) 876-4278.