“Sound of Music was one of those love-to-hate movies for me,” says Maile Flanagan, explaining why she decided to create a one-woman parody of the Rodgers and Hammerstein schmaltz classic.
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In Flanagan’s version all the musical’s “weird psychosexual subtext” is brought to the surface: the nuns are all lesbians, Captain von Trapp is a sadist, Liesl is a bisexual slut, and Maria has the spaced-out quality of someone in major denial.
The daughter of “very Irish Catholic” parents, Flanagan, an army brat, was born in Hawaii (Maile is Hawaiian for Mary) and spent her childhood in Thailand and Germany.
Nothing else Flanagan has written has been as popular as her one-woman Sound of Music. The show has had two long, sold-out runs in Minneapolis.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/John Noltner.
