one has music, the other doesn't

I've been to two stage productions in the last two days.

The musical one was South Bay Musical Theatre's production of The Sound of Music. Advertising for this heavily emphasized how the stage show is not sappy like the movie. And it was a good show, consistently interesting all the way through, fine singing, acting enough to give the impression those were the characters, not people playing them. Maria (Lauren D'Ambrosio) looked rather maternal, a bit disconcerting at the beginning, highly appropriate by the end; the Captain (Brad Satterwhite) kept from melting his emotions just long enough; Mother Abbess (Kama Belloni) thrilled everyone by belting out the end of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain"; the children (all but Liesl were double-cast) were amazingly good, in movement as well as voice; the Nazis were effectively sinister. The favorite songs - the title song, "My Favorite Things," "Do-Re-Mi" - were delivered with fresh energy, renewing appreciation of what remarkably good songs they are. A real winner.

The non-musical one was Theatre Works delivering their section of the rolling world premiere of Lauren Gunderson's new adaptation of Little Women. This did not work: it was too stagy, and the cast could be seen working their butts off rather than embodying the characters. Much of this was due to Gunderson's inept framing: the story is framed as Alcott writing it, and even within the frame half the dialogue is delivered in the third person, the actors describing what their characters are thinking or doing. This distanced the characters from the audience, destroying any illusion that the actors were the characters. The zippy condensation, in which events vanish in a flash, didn't help either. A real snore.