The Sound of Music, Pitlochry review: 'heartwarming and intelligent'

Jellyfish, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

At the turn of the year, Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s much-loved artistic director Elizabeth Newman - who arrived in 2018, and steered the theatre brilliantly through the tough pandemic years - will leave Pitlochry for Sheffield, to be replaced by Alan Cumming. It’s been a remarkable period in the Festival Theatre’s history, when the company has fully reconnected with the wider Scottish theatre scene, supported dozens of Scottish-based theatre-makers and artists, and opened brilliant new small auditoriums, both outdoors in the woods above the theatre, and in Pitlochry’s new studio theatre, now playing host to a generation of new Scottish plays.

So it’s only fitting that at a time when many companies in Scotland are struggling to create any new shows at all, Elizabeth Newman signs off with a full-scale production of The Sound Of Music that both impressive in itself, and also represents the company’s third major musical of the year, following summer productions of Footloose, and the Carole King musical Beautiful.

Featuring a cast of 20 - including a magnificent local team of von Trapp children - The Sound Of Music presents the Pitlochry team with challenge after challenge in terms of staging and performance, as the action moves from mountain to abbey to the von Trapp villa, and the score rolls on from one much-loved and brilliant Rodgers and Hammerstein number to the next, from the glorious title song, through Do-Re-Mi, to the anthemic Climb Every Mountain.

There’s also the more subtle challenge of striking the right mood, in a story that has become a Christmas favourite in the UK and beyond, and yet is set against the grim backdrop of the Anschluss of 1938, when Nazi Germany marched into Austria, and declared it part of the Third Reich.

Yet despite the odd scratchy moment in the orchestral playing - hardly surprising, with a band almost entirely composed of multi-talented and multi-tasking cast members - the company rises brilliantly to every one of these challenges, to deliver a heartwarming and deeply intelligent version of the familiar story, driven by a passionate connection with the music.

Kirsty Findlay rounds off a remarkable year at Pitlochry with a powerful and touching performance as Maria, while Ali Watt is a likeable captain von Trapp with a beautiful voice, and Kate Milner-Evans a commanding Mother Abbess. The choral singing is exquisite, from the first note of the opening nuns’ chorus. And the children are an absolute delight, perfectly choreographed yet full of fun and mischief, and singing like joyful little angels, at the heart of a great story about the power of love and music, even in the darkest times.

In Glasgow, meanwhile, the Play, Pie and Pint autumn season ends with a powerful debut play by Katy Nixon, this year’s winner of the David MacLennan Award for an emerging writer. Directed in fine, atmospheric style by incoming artistic director Brian Logan, Jellyfish takes us on a weekend break to Berlin with single mum Anna - superbly played by Kim Allan - and her son Robo, who has just turned 18.

Anna’s life has been dominated by her struggle to come to terms with early single motherhood in working-class Edinburgh, a world always contrasted, in her mind, with the teenage freedom she once found in the pubs and clubs of Berlin. Ahron Ashraf’s vividly confused Robo, meanwhile, is using this birthday trip to avoid a similar crisis in his own life. And as the two lose and find each other in one of the most exciting cities on earth, Nixon delivers a fast-moving yet beautifully written exploration of the painful business of growing up, throughout our lives; and of how hard it can be to express a love that comes accompanied by so much anxiety and responsibility, and sometimes by so much pain.

The Sound of Music is at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 22 December; Jellyfish is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 23 November.