When we first meet Maria, she is running around in the Alps outside Salzburg, Austria, singing her heart out to no in particular, clad in a striped dirndl apron over a black smock, her hair cut almost as short as Jean Seberg’s in Breathless. But instead of selling the New York Herald Tribune in the streets of Paris, Maria, a naughty novitiate, will shortly be dispatched to another employ—governess to a brood of monsters in sailor suits. Will Carrie Underwood, reprising the role Julie Andrew made famous in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, be similarly garbed, trading her tank tops and cut-offs for eyelet and sprig-prints? We will find out tonight, when The Sound of Music Live! airs on NBC.
The nuns who have concocted this job for Maria are themselves weirdly chic in voluminous dark habits that could have come off the Viktor & Rolf couture runway. Arriving at the von Trapp manse, however, Maria wears a sober gray dress with pleated skirt under a linen jacket with a high collar, a funny boater hat, black stockings, and neat little black boots. If the entire costume has a certain charm, it is apparently lost on Captain von Trapp, who insists that she cannot meet the children in this horrible ensemble. “But I don’t have another one,” she says, explaining that when she entered the convent she gave all her clothes to the poor, but “the poor didn’t want this one.” After hearing that she makes her clothes, the captain orders her to set about doing so—“Today, if possible.”
Well she can certainly sew—von Trapp (so mean before he turns so nice!) refuses to give her fabric to make the children something to wear besides those infernal nautical getups, so Maria fashions them outfits out of hideous green-and-white bedroom drapes, resulting in nutty lederhosen worthy of Hamish Bowles. Thus clad, like bizarre life-size Hummel figures, they take to the streets of Salzburg.
Then again, it’s not all whiskers on kittens and warm woolen mittens: There are two Salzburgian wet-T-shirt moments—the first, when Maria emerges, dirndl clinging, from a capsized canoe, and even more seductive, when eldest charge Liesl gets caught in a rainstorm, having sneaked off to see her special guy (turn out he’s a Nazi—you meet someone, and it’s always something). Her filmy chiffon dress—far prettier than Maria’s duds—is as gossamer as snowflakes on your nose and eyelashes.
But the sight of these two, nubile and dripping, is as nothing compared to the arrival of von Trapp’s lady friend, the Baroness Elsa Schraeder, who brandishes the following signs of decadence: a cigarette holder, dangling earrings, and even fingerless white gloves, the better to kiss her naked hand. “I am amusing, I suppose, and I do have the finest couturier in Vienna,” she offers. (And you can’t help but like her when the captain sings “Edelweiss,” and she mutters that she should have brought her harmonica.)
Meanwhile, Julie wafts pensively in fluttery turquoise, while the baroness looks down on her, figuratively and literally, from a balcony, the picture of amoral desire in a low-necked, blood-red dress, and black beaded bolero. But even this jaded character knows when she’s been beat. Turning to Van Trapp, she sighs, “Somewhere out there is a young lady who will never be a nun—Auf Wiedersehen, darling.”
And so to wed! When Maria and the captain finally tie the knot, she has at last eschewed the dirndl in favor of a full-on satin 1930s-ish bias-cut wedding dress, albeit one with long sleeves, high neck, and a veil vast enough to stretch from Austria to de Gaulle’s hidden headquarters in free France.
The Sound of Music Live! airs at 8:00 p.m. ET tonight on NBC.