Somewhere in the middle of “Do-Re-Mi,” a flag with a swastika on it gets hung over the front door of a house that used to feel safe. That’s the version of The Sound of Music landing at Music Hall at Fair Park September 8 through 20, and it isn’t the soft, sanitized family musical some people remember from childhood. Director Jack O’Brien has pulled the politics of 1938 Austria closer to the surface than any tour in recent memory, and audiences in city after city have noticed.
O’Brien isn’t new to this material. He directed the last national tour back in 2015, and this time he’s returned with something closer to a rebuild than a revival. He’s described the process as uncovering a version of the show that had been sitting dormant for years, material and ideas his creative team had circled around without ever putting on a stage.
Whatever the exact mechanics of that process, critics have landed on the same word again and again watching the result: timely. The Anschluss, the moment Nazi Germany annexed Austria, isn’t background scenery here. It’s the engine of the second act, and Captain von Trapp’s refusal to bend to it reads differently in 2026 than it did a decade ago.
Cayleigh Capaldi leads the cast as Maria, and she’s been drawing the kind of reviews that follow a performer around a tour like a spotlight. Critics in Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and San Diego have all singled her out, several noting she plays the role younger and more defiant than past Marias, closer to the actual age of the real postulant than Julie Andrews or Mary Martin ever were. Kevin Earley plays Captain von Trapp opposite her, a Naval hero written here as more closed-off and more grieving before Maria cracks him open.
Tony nominee Christiane Noll plays the Mother Abbess, and O’Brien has rebuilt her relationship with Maria into something closer to a mirror than a mentorship. He’s said the two women share a background, two people from the same kind of upbringing who chose to walk in opposite directions, and that framing gives “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” a different weight by the time it closes the first act.
The songs are still the songs. “My Favorite Things,” “Edelweiss,” the title number, all present and accounted for, all still capable of making a theater full of adults go quiet the way they did when most of them first heard these songs as kids. What’s changed is what surrounds them. Reviewers have called this one of the more expensively mounted non-Broadway tours currently on the road, with scenic design from Douglas W. Schmidt that stretches from an Austrian abbey to mountainside vistas rendered with enough detail that more than one critic described the projections as nearly photographic.
This is the production’s 65th anniversary tour, marking the years since the musical’s original Broadway debut, and Broadway Dallas is bringing it to Music Hall at Fair Park for a two-week run, September 8 through 20. Tickets are available now through Broadway Dallas.
The Sound of Music runs at Music Hall at Fair Park, 909 First Avenue in Dallas, September 8 through 20. Tickets and showtimes are available at dallas.broadway.com.
