WHAT would you call a musical whose producers chose their leading lady by asking Joe Public to rise from its armchairs and vote in a TV programme presented by a grinning, gloating Graham Norton? And then, a week before opening night, lost their leading man and asked his replacement to play a role as important to the proceedings as Falstaff is to Henry 1V? A sure-fire cataclysm, that’s what.

But that’s far from the impression that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music gave me. Connie Fisher overcame a nervy start (so many gestures I thought she was both conducting the orchestra and directing the traffic in nearby Oxford Street) to give a fine singing and even acting performance as the nun turned governess and governess turned wife, Maria. And Alexander Hanson was so sound as her employer turned husband, Captain von Trapp, that he could have been playing the role for as long as box-office success will surely compel him to perform it.

Add Lesley Garrett as a Mother Superior with a voice so ample and rich that it shrinks the Palladium to the size of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and she, Fisher and Hanson could be in their jobs for years.

And why not? Myself, I have a soft spot for The Sound of Music despite The Sound of Music. I tend to resist winsome heroines and loveable kids. My favourite things don’t include whiskers on kittens, warm woollen mittens and the other objects that thrill Maria and the von Trapp children. I would normally wince when an opera singer of Garrett’s stature sonorously invited me to climb every mountain, ford every stream and follow every rainbow until I found my dream. And I don’t think I could see the film of the show 5,110 times, which is what the guide of the Salzburg Sound of Music tour claimed was one of his customers’ current total.

Yet I acknowledge the pull of a show whose tale draws on three elemental fairy stories: Cinderella, Snow White and Beauty and the Beast. The self-effacing Maria gets her palace, makes seven sprogs happy and transforms a bossy grouch into an agreeable as well as handsome princeling. Or, to put it less pretentiously, it’s Mills and Boon with wonderfully hummable songs, plus a little politics to assuage clever folk who feel guilty for enjoying themselves.

Here’s the main difference from the film. The Anschluss doesn’t only make itself strongly felt, with Nazi banners, stormtroopers and all: it explains why von Trapp rejects his posh fiancée for Maria. What Austrian patriot would marry a woman who proclaims her me-first credo in a song missing from the movie? But this is not, I fear, why I remain a Sound of Music nerd. That has more to do with Fisher’s sweet, unpretentious Maria leading an excellent septet of von Trapp midgets in Do Re Mi and other songs. Why, they could even convert me to kittens with mittens on their whiskers.

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