Julie Andrews as Maria, striding across the Austrian hills, crooning The hills are alive with the sound of music or leading the von Trapp children through their Do-Re-Mis, is an image etched in the minds of those who have watched The Sound of Music (1965). As the movie hits 60 this year, Bengalureans who grew up to be theatre stalwarts flip the pages to the past, remember their first encounter with it.
For Maya Mascarenhas, founder of The Bangalore Chorus, the music and the beauty of Austria had her enraptured. “Just seeing something in a theatre was magical and everyone in school doted on Andrews and dreamt of being Liesl, the eldest von Trapp daughter,” she recalls. A year later, Mascarenhas was cast as one of the other sisters for a school play. “I remember looking at the photo when I was older and seeing myself in that little pinafore dress. I felt like a little actress,”she laughs.
Prem Koshy, senior theatre practitioner, saw the film as a six-year-old and remembers staring at the screen, mouth open, fascinated by the music and the story. “From then on, Andrews and Christopher Plummer were THE hero and heroine for me. The movie ran at the newly constructed Lido Theatre for over a year and I saw it countless times,” he shares.
The impact the film had on children of the time is undeniable with Ranga Shankara’s founder Arundhati Nag calling her peers the ‘Do-Re-Mi generation’ with a laugh.
She adds, “It was this song that taught all of India that English songs were not just The Beatles. Here was a song whose words you could understand because of its connectedness to Sa Re Ga Ma Pa. It was a real moment in Indian cinema’s history .”
But it was by no means solely a children’s film, with adults who had lived through World War II connecting with the Von Trapp family having to face the changes wrought on their homeland by Nazi occupation. Theatre personality Judith Bidapa points out a moment, when the Von Trapps are making their escape, that has stuck with her, saying “The war had been over for 20 years, but it was still fresh in the memories of our parents and grandparents. Watching it was emotional for them because they lived through it.”
From The Lonely Goatherd to Sixteen Going on Seventeen and Raindrops And Roses, tunes from the hills came alive in old Bangalore homes. “Bangaloreans, Goans, and the Christian communities – everybody sang. We took our potluck over and it would always end in singing,” says Bidapa. Koshy adds, “After watching it, we tried to play the music, learn every song, even get people to score it for us. The LP came out soon after and we must have bought two copies because we played it so much, the vinyl wore out.”
Some who grew up with the film have made watching it a family tradition. “Every year, I see The Sound of Music, and it never gets boring,” says director Kevin Oliver, as Mascarenhas adds, “We’ve watched it as a family many times like a sing-along movie.”