Happy Holidays! In this Christmas Special, we enter the timeless, charmed world of Dame Julie Andrews and my favorite movie of all time, The Sound of Music. We explore how Rodgers & Hammerstein evolved and elevated the musical as a form, the grand folk ideal of Maria von Trapp (vs. the self-conscious twee heroines of the 2010s), the actually-very-adult lessons of The Sound of Music, and the Dream / Threat of Unassailable Goodness.
My word for 2025 is Majestic — see you there ✨
Discussed:
The Sound of Music(1965)
“Audrey and Her Sisters” Wayne Koestenbaum in London Review of Books (1997)
“Maria von Trapp: The Preeminent Manic Pixie Dream Girl” Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic (2015)
