Again With the Kindness of Strangers

My sister and I went to see The Sound of Music on Saturday. More on that later.

First, let me tell you the funny, silly and heartwarming story of us actually getting to The Sound of Music. So: we bought the tickets online earlier in the week. We bought them after we’d had some wine. Not much wine, just two glasses or so. Then on Saturday afternoon, we printed off the tickets, and made dinner reservations at a great new Indian place near my sister’s house. My brother-in-law was set up with all four kids and a movie rental for them and we headed out for an early dinner.

The dinner was fabulous! And then, towards the end of dinner: it happened. Jen asked me what time it was. "It’s six-fifteen," I said, "does the show start at 7:00 or 7:30?"

"I don’t know…let me check the tickets." Her face fell. The tickets were for Saturday, December 13th. So far, so good. The problem? They were for the matinée. The 1:30 show. We were now nearly five hours late! And the worst part? This was the second time in a year that we had bought tickets to a matinée show and then missed it, only to show up for the evening performance. Talk about your dumb moves!

What to do now?

I suggested that we hop on the subway anyway and head down to the theatre and play dumb. After all, it had worked last time (when we showed up for the wrong performance of The Drowsy Chaperone, the House Manager generously found us some comparable seats elswhere in the theatre). The biggest glitch in our plan was that when we did it the first time, we were genuinely surprised that we were at the wrong performance. This time, we knew we’d missed our show and we weren’t sure we could pull off the innocent mistake routine.

So the answer? Blame it on someone else! While on the subway, we raced through a dozen different hare-brained schemes: we just flew in from out of town, but our flight was late so we missed the matinée…the website printed the wrong show by mistake…someone gave us the tickets as a gift and told us the wrong time… Ultimately, I turned to Jen and said, simply:

"Look. Maybe we should just be completely honest with them…"

Jen turned to me, eagerly. Yes! Honesty! It’s the best policy!

Encouraged by her bright, open, enthusiastic look I continued: "…our mother bought us these tickets, and just gave them to us at dinner…"

Looking into each other’s eyes, we burst into uncontrollable laughter. This was being "completely honest"? We laughed and laughed and doubled up and gasped for air until tears squeezed from our eyes. We couldn’t breathe for two whole stops we were laughing so hard. What a great release to some serious built-up tension.

In the end, we went with the "play it dumb" strategy, combined with a dose of "our mom gave us the tickets" (we figured it was better than "we bought the tickets while drunk". Which it is). Once again, the House Manager pulled through and managed to find two comparable seats for us. We were suitably and quite effusively grateful! The seats weren’t together, but they were only two rows apart, and we met up at the bar for a drink of wine during the intermission. All in all: a great night, thanks to the kindness of a complete stranger.

So…how was the show, you want to know?

Well, it was at the same time comfortably similar to what is likely my favourite movie (The Sound of Music, obviously) and yet disturbingly different. Turns out the stage production of The Sound of Music is faithful to the original broadway script, not the movie (who knew there was even an original broadway script before the movie version? Not me, anyway.) There are two songs in the stage show that don’t even appear in the movie (and just as well, in my opinion). However, the old favourites are all still there: "The Sound of Music", "Doh a Deer", "Climb Ev’ry Mountain"…and so on and the cast do a magnificent job of delivering them.

If you don’t already know the fairy-tale story of the casting of Elicia MacKenzie as Maria Von Trapp, you should go read it.

In her role as Maria, she reminded me of a brunette Julie Andrews (and that, I think you’ll agree, is very high praise indeed). I loved every minute that she was on stage.

Other faves? Noëlla Huet as Mother Abbess

("Climb Ev’ry Mountain" might have been the best number in the entire show) and Megan Nuttall as Liesl. In short? We had a very good night indeed (ticket mishaps notwithstanding).