Max and Elsa songs: "How Can Love Survive?" And "No Way To Stop it"

I wasn't at the meeting but there used to be pressure to cut down the running time when adapting Broadway musicals to films. Theater owners want to be able to screen the film as many times as possible during a day and are loathe to commit to a 2.5-3 hour running time. (Go back a couple of decades and you'll find movie adaptations cutting out EVERY song or every song that hadn't become a popular favorite by the time the film was made. The thinking before the OKLAHOMA! OBCR became a hit in toto was that if a song wasn't a hit, it wasn't necessary.)

And they had already decided to give Julie Andrews a new song in "Confidence".

So something had to go. And we don't really miss those songs, do we? I mean I enjoy it when they come along in a stage production just because the rest of the score is so over-played, but I don't miss them in the movie.

As for changing "Ordinary Couple" to "Something Good", I suspect Richard Rodgers thought there was potential to get a romantic pop hit out of the score (as opposed to all the children's songs which were already hits), but the replacement ballad wasn't any more popular than the original (despite being the best example of Rodgers setting his own lyrics).

All of this is my speculation. I'm sure there are books out there with the full story of the making of the film.

I so agree. "No Way to Stop It" and especially "How Can Love Survive?" are the two jauntiest, most delightful songs in the show.

The show is very long, especially for one positioned as a family show and which lots of kids will attend. And because those two songs aren't in the movie, general audiences do not miss them.

I like both songs and I thought they were the best part of the live broadcast with Laura Benanti and Christian Borle delivering them.

It initially had nothing to do with length. Ernest Lehman removed them from the screenplay because he felt Elsa and Max should not be singing characters. Once the movie became so popular, many productions of the play have featured the score as it is heard in the film.

A shame. They are wonderful songs.

Gaveston asked, "And we don't really miss those songs, do we?"

I certainly do; I think they're the smartest, most interesting thing about that show. The rest is sentimental treacle. That's probably why they were cut; the movie appeals because it's several hours of sanitary, simpleminded sentiment. Without those songs, Elsa is an easily digested two-dimensional bitch, and Max a merely amusing decorative homosexual ornament.

There is something about "No Way To Stop It" that has always sounded creepy or off. I think that it sets up the second act nicely. It sets the tone for the rest of the show, and the political and social climate of the time period.

I'd take No Way to Stop It over I Have Confidence. I agree with Julie Andrews that Confidence's lyrics are "inane," though to give her credit, she sold the daylights out of it!

But it's true there's a significant tonal shift there, and maybe they just didn't know how to handle it for the film.

I AM really glad that Something Good took the place of An Ordinary Couple, which I think is also inane.

Just in case you didn't know, both songs were included in the live NBC broadcast of The Sound of Music, and were done very well, in my opinion, by Christian Borle and Laura Benanti, in particular (no surprise, Broadway vets that they are!). The broadcast was notably bad in some respects, but also worth catching if you haven't is Audra McDonald's Climb Every Mountain! Break a leg with your show! :)

I used to use "No Way to Stop It" as my basic 32-bar audition song (it works well as a solo if cut) and the usual response was, "That's a great song... what's it from?"

"The Sound of Music... you probably cut it." That got a laugh, a 'yes' and normally got me a callback :)

Having listened to the OBC several dozen times before the film was made, I naturally missed them when they weren't in the film. They were jaunty and offset all the children's songs. They had sent Oscar to a place he seldom visited to get the lyrics: the land of the cynical and witty.

Had he lived, I wonder if Oscar would have opposed the deletion of the numbers. I don't know if he had any particular pride in the songs, but I suspect that he would have been in opposition. The lyrics to "No Way to Stop It" in particular are not only clever, but underneath the bouncy tune they are thought provoking. But I have never considered the arguments that henrikegerman raised against the inclusion, and I think that they are worth consideration.

Just to wander off topic again, Nancy Sinatra hosts a three hour weekly show on the SiriusXM radio channel devoted to me. She seems to have a genuine hostility to Broadway and New York for not honoring her father more. It is her interesting premise that many popular Broadway songs, absent her father's popularizing them and getting them out to the the heartland of the country, would have been pretty much forgotten.

Thinking perhaps of many Rodgers and Hart songs such as "Where or When" and "My Funny Valentine," which MGM didn't know enough to keep in the film version of Babes in Arms. Or some Kern classics like "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "I Won't Dance," that were immortalized in the Astaire and Rogers and Irene Dunne film version of Roberta, released two years after the Broadway show had debuted.

Of course Ella Fitzgerald's enormous Songbook series of the 50s did a lot for permanently popularizing many songs of the great Broadway composers, but would this project have gotten off the ground if so much of the population were not already familiar with many of the songs?

Why are you trying to figure out why Hollywood eliminated these songs from THE SOUND OF MUSIC film? Look at the mess they made out of HELLO, DOLLY!