Max and Elsa songs: "How Can Love Survive?" And "No Way To Stop it"

[C.Jack]

Posted: 10/15/17 at 10:38pm

I am currently in a production of The Sound Of Music playing Max. I was watching the movie to do further research on the character and found that him and elsa's songs are often cut from productions. Why is that? I find that they play a vital role in the story particularly No Way To Stop It. I've often heard it's due to Eleanor Parker being unable to sing in the movie but if that's the case then why not just dub her? They dubbed Christopher Plummer and Peggy Wood. I just want to know why these songs are cut.

 

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 10/15/17 at 11:54pm

I wasn't at the meeting but there used to be pressure to cut down the running time when adapting Broadway musicals to films. Theater owners want to be able to screen the film as many times as possible during a day and are loathe to commit to a 2.5-3 hour running time. (Go back a couple of decades and you'll find movie adaptations cutting out EVERY song or every song that hadn't become a popular favorite by the time the film was made. The thinking before the OKLAHOMA! OBCR became a hit in toto was that if a song wasn't a hit, it wasn't necessary.)

And they had already decided to give Julie Andrews a new song in "Confidence".

So something had to go. And we don't really miss those songs, do we? I mean I enjoy it when they come along in a stage production just because the rest of the score is so over-played, but I don't miss them in the movie.

As for changing "Ordinary Couple" to "Something Good", I suspect Richard Rodgers thought there was potential to get a romantic pop hit out of the score (as opposed to all the children's songs which were already hits), but the replacement ballad wasn't any more popular than the original (despite being the best example of Rodgers setting his own lyrics).

All of this is my speculation. I'm sure there are books out there with the full story of the making of the film.

[MackTheKnife2]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 12:34am

I am not a big fan of The Sound of Music, and I think it’s a shame both songs didn’t make the cut, since I believe those are the best numbers in the whole score (except, perhaps, for Edelweiss). At least the ones with the most interesting and fun lyrics.

[mamaleh]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 12:55am

I so agree.  "No Way to Stop It" and especially "How Can Love Survive?" are the two jauntiest, most delightful songs in the show.  

[Soaring29]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 12:58am

I like them a lot too! Why are they cut so much for productions of the show?

[Wilmingtom]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 1:08am

The show is very long, especially for one positioned as a family show and which lots of kids will attend.  And because those two songs aren't in the movie, general audiences do not miss them.

[NOWaWarning]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 1:43am

They're also definitely the most serious/intellectually mature songs. I don't think people go to the Sound of Music to watch three adults ponder their economic advantages or debate horrifying political issues.

[CATSNYrevival]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 1:54am

I like both songs and I thought they were the best part of the live broadcast with Laura Benanti and Christian Borle delivering them.

[After Eight]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 6:19am

I like them too, as I like the entire score of The Sound of Music.

[The Other One]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 6:33am

It initially had nothing to do with length.  Ernest Lehman removed them from the screenplay because he felt Elsa and Max should not be singing characters.  Once the movie became so popular, many productions of the play have featured the score as it is heard in the film.

A shame.  They are wonderful songs.

[Bell0708]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 7:41am

Probably because the movie didn't have the songs in them, reason being the movie was about 5 hours too long as it was!

[newintown]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 8:02am

Gaveston asked, "And we don't really miss those songs, do we?"

I certainly do; I think they're the smartest, most interesting thing about that show. The rest is sentimental treacle. That's probably why they were cut; the movie appeals because it's several hours of sanitary, simpleminded sentiment. Without those songs, Elsa is an easily digested two-dimensional bitch, and Max a merely amusing decorative homosexual ornament.

[C.Jack]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 9:17am

The other problem with removing these songs is that they remove most of Max and Elsa's depth as characters. When they remove these songs, it just makes Elsa a flat bitch and Max a stereotypical sassy gay friend.

[fashionguru_23]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 9:35am

There is something about "No Way To Stop It" that has always sounded creepy or off. I think that it sets up the second act nicely. It sets the tone for the rest of the show, and the political and social climate of the time period. 

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 9:56am

Couldn't agree less that these two songs should have been kept for the movie.  This is a clear example of less being more for a movie score.

The Sound of Music the movie would be less for including these songs.  Maria is bringing music into this familly.  Max and Elsa are part of this family - Max the "uncle" and Elsa the wanna-be-"mother" under the terms Georg wants before he meets and is ultimately won over by Maria.  So Lehman was absolutely correct that it's far better for Max and Elsa to be non-singing characters.

On top of which, these two songs, as serious as their underlying themes are (particularly so with No Way to Stop It) markedly differ from the rest of the score.  They are comic relief songs in an operetta model.  They are more turn of the century (or even earlier) theatrically and musically than midcentury in comparison to How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? So Long, Farewell, and The Lonely Goatherd.   And like I Have Confidence (added brilliantly for the film), How Do You Solve a Problem? essentially defines Maria as central character - which is certainly not true for No Way to Stop It an How Can Love Survive.   Whereas So Long, Farewell and The Lonely Goatherd are charm songs which advance the narrative of music becoming part of the Von Trapp immediate family's home-life.   No Way to Stop It is not essential to advance how people respond or don't to fascism because the show's book and movie's script already fully explore that.  As much as the book also adequately covers why Elsa and Georg are wrong for each other (without the flippantly amusing musical treatment of that issue is How Can Love Survive? - plus the reason the two are wrong for each other has much more to do with their core characters, rather than they're both being aristocrats, as the song implies).  Georg truly loves Maria body and soul, he doesn't patronizingly fetishize her because she's just a simple mountain girl without a cent.

Updated On: 10/16/17 at 09:56 AM

[MCfan2]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 11:13am

I'd take No Way to Stop It over I Have Confidence. I agree with Julie Andrews that Confidence's lyrics are "inane," though to give her credit, she sold the daylights out of it!

But it's true there's a significant tonal shift there, and maybe they just didn't know how to handle it for the film.

I AM really glad that Something Good took the place of An Ordinary Couple, which I think is also inane.

 

[Auggie27]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 12:13pm

The film operates by its own quasi-realistic rules, i.e. that this singing woman brings song (back) into a house devoid of it. The music we get, once "Confidence" is out of the way, is mostly diegetic, resulting from Maria picking up a guitar. If these two non singers began to sing, it would suggest Maria's influence has turned the household into .. well, a B'way musical, which the film doesn't want to be.  It's a logical decision.  

For the record, I saw Parker in the national of "Applause."  She sang better than Bacall (to less impact). She could've pulled off the numbers once in studio; that was never the issue, as many note.

[TNick926]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 12:20pm

Just in case you didn't know, both songs were included in the live NBC broadcast of The Sound of Music, and were done very well, in my opinion, by Christian Borle and Laura Benanti, in particular (no surprise, Broadway vets that they are!).  The broadcast was notably bad in some respects, but also worth catching if you haven't is Audra McDonald's Climb Every Mountain!  Break a leg with your show! :)

[MCfan2]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 1:08pm

I don't consider How Can Love Survive any great loss, but I do like that they worked the tune into the ballroom scene in the movie. It made a nice waltz.

[IronMan]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 1:52pm

I used to use "No Way to Stop It" as my basic 32-bar audition song (it works well as a solo if cut) and the usual response was, "That's a great song... what's it from?"

"The Sound of Music... you probably cut it."  That got a laugh, a 'yes' and normally got me a callback :) 

[Smaxie]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 2:19pm

This might be a minority opinion, but I think "No Way to Stop It" runs out of ideas after the introductory verse. Given the song's ambition, I don't find the lyrics are quite able to pull it off and it ends up just nattering about for three minutes. The verse and the refrain are almost two different songs. 

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 3:10pm

Having listened to the OBC several dozen times before the film was made, I naturally missed them when they weren't in the film. They were jaunty and offset all the children's songs. They had sent Oscar to a place he seldom visited to get the lyrics: the land of the cynical and witty. 

Had he lived, I wonder if Oscar would have opposed the deletion of the numbers. I don't know if he had any particular pride in the songs, but I suspect that he would have been in opposition. The lyrics to "No Way to Stop It" in particular are not only clever, but underneath the bouncy tune they are thought provoking. But I have never considered the arguments that henrikegerman raised against the inclusion, and I think that they are worth consideration.

Just to wander off topic again, Nancy Sinatra hosts a three hour weekly show on the SiriusXM radio channel devoted to me. She seems to have a genuine hostility to Broadway and New York for not honoring her father more. It is her interesting premise that many popular Broadway songs, absent her father's popularizing them and getting them out to the the heartland of the country, would have been pretty much forgotten. 

Thinking perhaps of many Rodgers and Hart songs such as "Where or When" and "My Funny Valentine," which MGM didn't know enough to keep in the film version of Babes in Arms. Or some Kern classics like "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "I Won't Dance," that were immortalized in the Astaire and Rogers and Irene Dunne film version of Roberta, released two years after the Broadway show had debuted.

Of course Ella Fitzgerald's enormous Songbook series of the 50s did a lot for permanently popularizing many songs of the great Broadway composers, but would this project have gotten off the ground if so much of the population were not already familiar with many of the songs?

 

[Boq101]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 6:39pm

I love both of those songs, and when I did the show we kept them in. But the show is always a billion hours long. Specially for a show that kids want to go to, I can see why theaters would make the unfortunate decision to cut them. 

I will say we did get to add I  Have Confidence as well as use Something Good. 

[Dollypop]

Posted: 10/16/17 at 6:49pm

Why are you trying to figure out why Hollywood eliminated these songs from THE SOUND OF MUSIC film? Look at the mess they made out of HELLO, DOLLY!

[darquegk]

Posted: 10/17/17 at 10:15am

One detail most people overlook or flat-out never realized about "No Way to Stop It" is that it is, by design, a Theodore Bikel show-piece: an upbeat, European-folk-influenced song built around a jaunty guitar strum that would enable their guitar-playing leading man to act while playing; the script directly indicates that his guitar-playing is an outlet for his conflicted emotions.

With other Captains (who were not familiar quadruple threats), the number became merely a character piece for the three grown-ups, instead of a moment designed around the specific talents of a unique Broadway performer.