Showbiz Queenstown had a difficult task in staging a familiar 53-year-old global hit while putting the Wakatipu's own stamp on it.
But whether by accident or design, the kaleidoscope of accents singing and acting on opening night charmingly mirrored the multinational audience which enthusiastically clapped after every song and made the Broadway musical quintessentially Queenstown.
It was a veritable who's who of the community on opening night, with Queenstown Lakes District Council staff and councillors, including Mayor Vanessa van Uden, plus Deputy Prime Minister and Clutha-Southland MP Bill English, as well as identities from Wakatipu business, tourism, education, medicine, media and the general public in a packed memorial hall.
Praise be to the "nuns" for opening the show in seamless multilayered harmonies, despite the dense Latin lyrics.
Murmurs of recognition and appreciation abounded when rebel postulant Maria Rainer (Remarkables Primary School teacher Lisa Moore) sweetly sang the title song.
Moore's voice was as clear and pure as an Austrian alpine stream as she trilled crowd-pleasing favourites Do-Re-Mi, My Favorite Things, The Lonely Goatherd and So Long, Farewell with the first of two casts of von Trapp children, as their governess.
Credit to the young casts for essentially carrying the show and coping with changing costume after every scene they appeared in.
Free-spirited Maria's clash against strict widower Captain Georg von Trapp (Chris Parvin) over how to raise the children raised laughs in the right places and the two leads worked to sell the characters' sudden, contrived switch from antagonism to romance in the space of a dance.
While Maria and the children were the heart of The Sound of Music, the mind was served by the dramatic pressure Captain von Trapp endured from the deliciously duplicitous Baroness Elsa Schraeder (Fiona Stephenson) and Max Detweiler (Chris McKenzie) to conform to the looming annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
The fascist undertow gave the otherwise wholesome family melodrama a thrilling edge, which came to a climax when the von Trapp family sang at the Salzberg Festival while attempting to flee from Austria.
The cheers, whoops and standing ovation the audience gave cast and crew at the end of the premiere was well deserved.
The show was an entertaining triumph against the limitations of budget and facilities.
Wakatipu residents and visitors should climb every mountain, search high and low and follow every byway to enjoy The Sound of Music while they can.
