- Network: NBC
- Series Premiere Date: Dec 5, 2013
Critic Reviews
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The "American Idol" winner doesn’t have any theater experience, and she went on to do a lot better in the singing department than in the acting one.... If someone should be banned from singing ever again, it should be Moyer.... Cannily the producers surrounded our rookies with fairly charming kids and a formidable array of Broadway pros.
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Underwood, in the role of Maria, didn't entirely succeed--acting is part of the bargain, after all. But NBC's live version of Richard Rodgers' and Oscar Hammerstein's beloved musical, staged at Grumman Studios in Bethpage, largely did.
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Carrie Underwood isn’t an actor and Stephen Moyer isn’t a singer and together they lacked chemistry as Maria and Captain Von Trapp..... The highpoint of the evening was Audra McDonald’s rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” and Laura Benanti as the Baroness lit up the screen.
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It wasn’t a singalong or a sacrilege or a slavish, shameless remake. It was a live performance of a legendary musical that felt muted and a little sad.
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An ambitious--yet disappointingly stiff--staging of the original musical.
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The supporting cast was strong: Laura Benanti was appropriately sultry as Elsa Von Hottie, while Christian Borle was appropriately hammy as Max Detweiler and someone should find a way to have McDonald sing audiences into every commercial break.... And yet, without Underwood and Moyer selling us on this legendary love story, The Sound of Music Live plays like very expensive karaoke.
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When the music stopped, the sound of Underwood was underwhelming: drab, devoid of energy or passion, creating a vapid hole at the center of a charming and diverting production. Her chemistry with a similarly stiff Stephen Moyer, as an awkwardly gaunt Capt. Von Trapp, felt like wilted edelweiss.
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[Underwood's] limitations as an actor were particularly obvious when she was sharing scenes with the show's two best assets: Tony winners Audra McDonald as the Mother Abbess and Laura Benanti as the Baroness.
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For the most part [Directors Beth McCarthy-Miller and Rob Ashford] couldn’t make the story sing between the musical numbers, and the tingle one can get from a live theatrical experience didn’t materialize as filtered through the remove of TV.
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Neither [Underwood nor Moyer were] helped by the fact that the production stuck to the original Broadway show, which premiered more than half a century ago. It was full of business that might be delightful or even exciting on a stage--nuns gliding about while singing their alleluias, characters racing up and down grand, sweeping staircases--but on a wide-screen television it tended to look like just that, lots and lots of stage business.
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As a stage actress, there was no way to regard [Underwood] as anything but an amateur--good enough, certainly, to convey the meaning of her lines, and sometimes better than that, but lacking weight and substance and the shadings she can bring to a song.... Stephen Moyer had the anger and the stiffness the role certainly requires, but not the humor it needs.... It was helpful, if you wanted to help, to regard this as really terrific community theater, rather than something professional and less than successful.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 28
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Mixed: 2 out of 28
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Negative: 9 out of 28
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Dec 6, 2013
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Dec 7, 2013
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Dec 6, 2013