A debut season, a crowd favorite

When Maria, the singing governess in “The Sound of Music,” teaches her young charges the tones of the major scale, she gives them the building blocks for a lifetime of music-making.

The lesson, conveyed in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune “Do-Re-Mi,” resonated with particular meaning over the weekend as San Gabriel Valley Music Theatre introduced itself with four performances of the 1959 musical.

From this most basic of beginnings -- just a few performances of a tried-and-true show -- the group hopes to build a new tradition of musical-theatergoing in the San Gabriel Valley, filling a void left five years ago when Music Theatre of Southern California ceased operations after nearly 18 years in the grand Old California-Mission-style San Gabriel Civic Auditorium.

A cast of 46 filled the stage; 12 instrumentalists occupied the pit. Rented sets and costumes lent visual dazzle. And if the staging, by director Bill Shaw and choreographer Rikki Lugo, didn’t brave the troubling undercurrents of this deceptively chipper musical, it nevertheless strove mightily to deliver the “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” message at the show’s core.

Of course, audiences don’t buy tickets to this show because they want to be reminded of perilous times in 1938 Austria, when a divided nation caved in to Nazi annexation; they turn out to hear such songs as “My Favorite Things” and the title number. In this, they weren’t disappointed. The singing was beautiful, and the music overall, under Lloyd Cooper’s supervision, enjoyable.

Victoria Strong sang especially well as Maria, the postulant nun who becomes governess to the seven children of a widowed naval captain. From Maria’s opening reverie in an Alpine glade through the Von Trapp family’s climactic performance under Nazi soldiers’ watchful eyes, Strong sent her soprano fluttering like a bird into the mountain air.

As the Mother Abbess, Kris Wildman delivered high, ringing tones in the “Favorite Things” duet and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”; as budding lovers Rolf and Liesl, Chris R. Ciccarelli and Nickie M. Gentry combined lustrous baritone and sweet, smooth soprano in “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” To audience members who once frequented Music Theatre of Southern California’s presentations, it must have been comforting to find Shaw and Lugo once again in charge of a production as they were so many times before with the old group.

The inaugural season continues with a Jan. 20 presentation of “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” and May 4-6 performances of “The King and I.” Modest beginnings, to be sure, but with luck, perhaps the Do-Re-Mi of a vital music-theater presenter.

daryl.miller@latimes.com