A leg-kicking legacy

There is a must-have DVD on the way, augmenting the movie with a Julie Andrews documentary, a mass of out-takes and unique footage of Maria herself appearing on an American TV gameshow. And there is more than one way to watch the disc.

In two generations, The Sound of Music has gone from stage show to gay cult to Salzburg tourist trap, a status matched only by the likes of Elvis

and Princess Di. Yet the score makes no concession to commercial culture, strict in its multi-part harmony and unadorned orchestration, a summit for others to climb. What it achieves, in historical terms, is a span of pre and postmodern cultures, approachable both as musical entertainment and as ironic commentary. The ultimate dimensions of some of these formative musicals have yet to be fully revealed.

Chapin, 56, was in at a pivotal moment, as an assistant on Stephen Sondheim's Follies in 1971. He has written an enthrallingly detailed book about his experiences and called it Everything Was Possible, because that's what musicals are: the ultimate in hopes, dreams and human collaboration.

Sondheim and his director Hal Prince were born into the form. They first met in the lobby on the opening night of South Pacific in April 1949, Prince as a guest of the Rodgers family and Sondheim with his loco parentis,-Oscar Hammerstein.

They teamed up in Company, the 1970 Sondheim musical that explored the state of marriage at the dawn of women's liberation and gay rights - dangerous terrain for family entertainment.

The next year, in Follies, they went one further, using the backdrop of a crumbling Ziegfeld theatre as a metaphor for Vietnam-era confusions.

Follies flopped, as much for the subtexts as for its textural sophistication. It ran 522 nights on Broadway with a loss of $792,000, the only score that counts on the Cruel White Way. One rare critic who got the point reckoned it would take 15 years to find an audience. It took, in fact, 30 before Follies returned to Broadway.

Another saw it as the death of musical theatre: "The creators are in essence presenting their own funeral." Prince still considers it "my favourite show - all about instincts and feelings", and Chapin feels himself blessed to have assisted, if only as typist, gawper and gofer, at its birth. Follies turned out to be not so much an end-point as an intellectual reopening, from which much else has since flowed.

Chapin, whose father, Schuyler, was head of the Metropolitan Opera, wound up running the Rodgers and Hammerstein estates, using their legacy to extend awareness of musical theatre as a whole. Where other copyright custodians demand strict adherence to composers' wishes, R&H will license your am-dram to do The Sound of Music with a karaoke audience dressed as nuns and Nazis.

Chapin is upbeat about current musicals, extolling Adam Guettel's Light in the Piazza which swept six Tonys this year - as many as Guettel's maternal grandfather, Richard Rodgers, won for The Sound of Music.

Before Chapin left for London, Stephen Sondheim called. "You've got to see Billy Elliot," he said. "The first half-hour's the best I've seen since the things Hal and I did 20 years ago."

"People judge musicals by a simple criterion," observes Chapin. "They say: 'Is it taking off ? Is it selling tickets?' But that's wrong. The musical is a complex thing that can take decades to find an audience, and it keeps maturing all the time."

The dimensions, as I suggested, are still emerging. No artform since the great cathedrals of medieval times has been made in this way, by dozens of artists working together over six or nine months, unknowing whether the work will crash on completion, or last for ever.

Ted Chapin's Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies, is published by Applause Books.