The Sound of Music

The Sound of Music is a two-act musical about Maria, a free-spirited postulant in Salzburg, Austria, who becomes governess to a widowed navy captain's seven children in 1938, just before Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Richard Rodgers wrote the music and Oscar Hammerstein II the lyrics; Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse wrote the book. The show was suggested by Maria Augusta Trapp's 1949 memoir, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.

This staging is a Broadway revival from Lincoln Center Theater, a nonprofit company, presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater as part of its 2026–27 season. It is the musical's second Broadway revival, after a 1998 production, and its first return to Broadway in nearly 30 years. Lear deBessonet, the company's artistic director, is directing, and Christopher Gattelli is the choreographer. As of October 2026, Jasmine Amy Rogers has been announced as Maria.

It was the last musical Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote together: Hammerstein died in 1960, nine months after the Broadway opening. The original production won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and the 1965 film took Best Picture among its five Academy Awards.

The first act opens at Nonnberg Abbey. Maria Rainer is a lively postulant who cannot stop slipping out to roam the hills, and the Mother Abbess sends her out of the abbey to work as governess at the villa of Captain Georg von Trapp. The Captain, a naval officer and widower, treats his household like a ship's crew and summons his children with a boatswain's whistle. Maria takes the opposite approach, earns the children's trust and gets them singing.

Liesl, the eldest at 16, falls into a romance with Rolf, a young telegram messenger. The Captain arrives home with Baroness Elsa Schraeder, the woman he plans to marry, and his friend Max Detweiler, a music agent busy putting together a festival. When the Captain hears his children sing again, his guard drops, and he asks Maria to stay. Then, at a party, a folk dance with the Captain makes Maria realize what she feels for him. She flees to the abbey, but the Mother Abbess sends her back to the family to face those feelings.

In the second act, politics move into the house. The Captain will not accept the annexation that is coming, his engagement to Elsa falls apart, and he and Maria confess their love and marry. Once the Anschluss has taken place, he is told he must serve as an officer in Germany's navy, and Rolf, it turns out, has joined the Nazis. Max has booked the family to sing at the Kaltzburg Festival, and that concert becomes their cover for a plan to leave Austria.

Every song in the original score was new. The nuns sing liturgical pieces in Latin, starting with the "Preludium" that opens the evening, and the Ländler that Maria and the Captain dance borrows only loosely from the traditional Austrian dance. "Edelweiss" is not an old Austrian song either: it was composed for this musical and became familiar in Austria only after the film came out.

Several numbers became standards. A few to listen for, in the order of the original 1959 production:

• "The Sound of Music": Maria's solo early in the first act.
• "My Favorite Things": first sung by Maria and the Mother Abbess; some productions move it to a thunderstorm scene.
• "Do-Re-Mi": Maria and the children, from the part of the first act in which she teaches them to sing.
• "Sixteen Going on Seventeen": the duet for Liesl and Rolf.
• "Climb Ev'ry Mountain": the Mother Abbess's song that ends the first act and comes back in the finale.
• "Edelweiss": sung by the Captain in the second act.

Stage versions of the score vary. After Hammerstein's death, Rodgers wrote "I Have Confidence" and "Something Good" for the 1965 film, and many stage revivals include them, sometimes with "Something Good" in place of "An Ordinary Couple." As of October 2026, Lincoln Center Theater had not published its song list, so the list on this page follows the original staging.

Lincoln Center Theater has said this revival centers on the von Trapps' private story as a family relearning how to love, with the Nazi rise to power and its creep into daily life as the backdrop. The Beaumont itself is built around a flexible thrust stage, with roughly 1,080 seats rising steeply on two levels in a semicircle, so much of the audience sits to the sides of the stage as well as in front of it.

As of October 2026, Rogers is the only announced cast member. She made her Broadway debut in 2025 in Boop! The Musical, which brought her a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical, along with a Drama Desk Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Theatre World Award.

The idea came from director Vincent J. Donehue, who had seen the 1956 West German film The Trapp Family and its 1958 sequel and proposed the story for Mary Martin. The first plan was a play by Lindsay and Crouse built on songs from the Trapp Family Singers' own repertoire; it grew into a full musical with a new score by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Martin's husband, Richard Halliday, produced it with Leland Hayward, and Rodgers and Hammerstein were also credited as producers.

The stage story bends the facts. Maria Augusta Trapp first came to the von Trapp home from Nonnberg Abbey in 1926 to tutor one daughter who was ill, not to take charge of all the children, and she married Georg von Trapp at the abbey in 1927, more than a decade before the Anschluss. The writers also renamed the children, changed their ages and gave Maria the surname Rainer.

After eight tryout performances at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven in October 1959 and a short stop in Boston, the musical reached the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway on November 16, 1959. Mary Martin played Maria, Theodore Bikel the Captain and Patricia Neway the Mother Abbess, under Donehue's direction. The original stayed on Broadway until June 15, 1963, switching to the Mark Hellinger Theatre partway through, on November 6, 1962; by its last night it had given 1,443 performances.

Florence Henderson led the first national tour, which began in Detroit on February 27, 1961, and wound up in Toronto in 1963. London's first production, at the Palace Theatre from May 18, 1961, outlasted Broadway's with 2,385 performances, and a 1981 West End revival starring Petula Clark became the first stage version to use the two film songs.

Broadway's first revival opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on March 12, 1998, after previews from February 6, 1998. Susan H. Schulman directed Rebecca Luker as Maria and Michael Siberry as the Captain; Laura Benanti made her Broadway debut as Maria's understudy and later took over the role. It played 533 performances before closing on June 20, 1999. Jack O'Brien later directed two North American tours: one that began in Los Angeles in 2015 and ran until 2017, and another that set out in September 2025 with choreography by Danny Mefford.

The original Broadway cast album, recorded for Columbia Masterworks a week after the 1959 opening, held the top spot on the Billboard albums chart for 16 weeks in 1960. Robert Wise directed the 1965 film for 20th Century Fox, with Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews in the leads; its soundtrack has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

Lincoln Center Theater announced this revival on June 23, 2026, and tickets went on sale on September 17, 2026. The first preview is scheduled for March 23, 2027, and opening night for April 15, 2027, for a limited engagement of 17 weeks.