Did you know that, adjusted for inflation, The Sound of Music (1965) is the third-biggest box office hit of all time? It made more money than Titanic, Avatar or any Star Wars movie since the first. (The all-time champ is still Gone With the Wind, which made the equivalent of 1.6 billion dollars since 1939.) The Julie Andrews film version won Best Picture, adding accolades to the Tony for Best Musical won (OK, tied for) by the Mary Martin Broadway debut five years earlier.

If "you are 60, going on 70," The Sound of Music was one of the biggest pop culture events of your youth. It's a holiday standby on stage and TV, and I imagine it reminds you of happier, more innocent times. That's probably why the matinée lobby at Tacoma Musical Playhouse was a traffic jam of walkers, wheelchairs and portable oxygen tanks. Me, I'd never actually seen the thing; but thanks to the ubiquity of its Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, I felt like I already had. Nothing in the show comes as a surprise. It's rather like watching Psycho (also from 1960) for the first time: you already know Janet Leigh isn't long for this earth, so the suspense level's basically nil.

That's no knock on TMP's production. It's been crafted with obvious care. Marissa Ryder, a TMP regular, makes and sings a lovely Maria. Karen Early Evans provides operatic chops in the role of Mother Abbess. Jonathan Bill's an imposing Captain Georg and has a resonant baritone. Director Jon Douglas Rake's choreography is often straight from the movie, which is fine in this context. Will Abrahamse and John Chenault offer yeoman work on the set and lights, respectively. If I felt like nitpicking, I could say the von Trapp family lacked energy, or that acoustics were occasionally muddled and Sophia Lewis too quiet as Liesl. For the most part, though, an audience awash with gray hair got exactly what it wanted: a loving reproduction of a childhood favorite. Cue the cash registers!

So why was I unmoved? The midcentury model of Broadway musicals, in which no one really acts but rather sings at the audience and saunters from mark to mark, has become so passé it's like watching a cuckoo clock chime: we appreciate the mechanics far more than the story. From a narrative standpoint, The Sound of Music is a dull affair. The cartoonish antagonist doesn't arrive until well in Act II, the "problem" with Maria is she's earnest but sometimes late for Mass, and the captain will obviously fall for her the second she walks in the door. I doubt any student of the Holocaust believes rich Austrian gentiles were its foremost victims. Maybe it's time for a revisionist production, in which the convent's omitted and Maria is Jewish. Hmm...

TACOMA PLAYHOUSE, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, THROUGH DEC. 16, 8 P.M. FRIDAY-SATURDAY, 2 P.M. SATURDAY-SUNDAY, $20-$29, 7116 SIXTH AVE., TACOMA, 253.565.6867

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