Not your childhood van Trapps…
The same friend who treated us to the SCA benefit performance “Snow White and the Seven Hos” invited us to see that show’s impresario Michael Roth’s latest romp “The Sound of Recovery Music”. Once again a beloved classic musical would be lovingly, trashily repurposed as a hysterical inspirational parody polemic about overcoming one’s addictions.
We meet our heroine Maria twirling on a mountaintop singing “The hills are alive with recovery music”. It turns out this novitiate is a sex addict, immediately illustrated by a tryst with a hunky shirtless goatherd.
A sextet of nuns, some played by men in drag, discuss how does one solve this problem with Maria:
“I’d like to say a word on her behalf:
Maria …
would fuck a giraffe!”
Mother Superior sends Maria to the home of Captain van Smack, where she is to be a temporary governess to the Captain’s seven children, all of whom have addictions of their own. Friedrich has a meth problem (in addition to being an insatiable power bottom), Brigitte has a gambling addiction, Louise a food addiction, Kurt is a pothead, and so on. While the diverse cast of adults playing the children were only a few years out of adolescence, Gretl, the youngest van Smack child, was played by a gnarly 60something in drag.
The children struggle gamely and uproariously with their various addictions. Soon we see Liesl singing with boyfriend Rolf about their sobriety journey: “You’ve got six days, going on seven days…”. (The actor playing Friedrich also played Rolf, which makes sense since both Rolf and Friedrich are both so obviously homosexual in the original movie; as I said to Ed when we later watched Liesl dance with her brother in the movie: the dear girl is fated to dance only with blond gay boys).
Maria bonds with the kids through cheerful songs that aid sobriety and recovery. When they struggle with their addictions, she rallies them by singing about having memories or waking up without mysterious bruises in “these are the joys that recovery brings” (although there is a dark part of me that wants to remember this song rewrite as focusing on “those are a few of my triggering things”). And, rather than teaching them, say, the names of musical notes, as another governess might, Maria teaches mnemonic melodic phrases about the 12 steps (“One, you quit, you say that’s it…”).
The original Gloria Gaynor record reigns supreme. But my personal favorite cover is also the version that is the most different from the original. Recorded by the Danish trio Funky Nashville, it is very, well, funky and Nashville, replete with a spaghetti western electric guitar taking on the original’s famous string obligatos. It especially earns its Gay Pride of Place through its prominent inclusion in the German Gay soccer comedy “Männer Wie Wir” (“Guys and Balls”).
And while we’re listening to jazzy stylings, we better include Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox take, with Sara Niemitz slaying the vocals and the brass section hot-jazzing those obligatos. Their studio recording is slick, but the live version is smokin’:
It is part of a longer section in the short story, where Poe allows the narrator to ruminate on terrors in the dark before describing the murder to come. The narration eerily extends that breathless moment before the protagonist 
