Richard Bado is Extremely Excited—Conservatively, at 100 on a Scale of 1-10—About Conducting The Sound of Music at HGO This Spring

HGO Chorus Director Richard Bado—now celebrating 40 years with the company—is sitting at his desk in his Wortham Theater Center office, when, suddenly, he’s inspired to jump to his feet. He grabs a blanket from the back of a nearby chair, drapes it over his head like a nun’s veil, clasps his hands in prayer, and, with solemnity, returns to his desk.  

Bado is remembering being a child in the suburbs of Pittsburgh—a child obsessed with The Sound of Music.  

“I announced to my parents that when I grew up, I wanted to be a nun,” he remembers. “First of all, we weren’t Catholic. Second, I’m a guy. So I would walk around the house with this thing on, and I’d go to the dinner table, and they’d look at me—and I’d cross myself. They were like, who is this child?”  

It was a loving household, Bado is quick to say, but he was the only member of the family who adored music. His father was a football coach, and his brothers played sports. “No one in my family is musical,” he says. “No one.” In the movie, though, “these kids get to sing all the time,” he says. “So it was sort of a fantasy.”  

Yes, it was a fantasy, one that began when Bado was 6 in 1965, the year the film was released, and grew and grew until this moment, the eve of the finale of HGO’s 2023-24 season, with Bado set to conduct the musical on the Wortham Theater Center’s Brown Stage.  

“It was inevitable,” he says, speaking from behind the pile of Sound of Music books and paraphernalia stacked on his desk. “It is time.”  

His delight evident, Bado tells us more… 

What is your first memory of The Sound of Music? 

The movie came out in 1965. I was 6 years old. The family had taken me only to one movie, the year before, which was Mary Poppins. It was an event to go to the movies. We went to this pancake place. I remember it was all-you-could-eat pancakes. At that point, the two movies I’ve seen have music, singing, Julie Andrews—but I couldn’t believe it was the same person because they looked different.   

Then we bought the long-play record—and ’65 is also about the time I started piano lessons, too. I would play it on the record player over and over and over. I had every word memorized. And then, shortly, my piano teacher got me an easy ‘Selections from The Sound of Music’ to play for little kids. And I learned all the songs on the piano. And once you memorized it, you got a little sticker. And I had that book. And I may still have that score at home. 

Was it instant love?  

The Sound of Music was sort of an escape because everybody in my family was into sports, and I wasn’t really interested in that. The movie has an intermission, and that was—is still—unusual. And my older brother, of course, the jock, thought, it’s over with, you know? But I just loved the idea of these kids singing all the time because I like to sing all the time. And I had a kindergarten teacher say to my mom, he loves music. This teacher said to my parents, this is his passion. So they got me a little chord organ, just as a toy. But I was picking out tunes immediately.  

How many times have you seen the movie?  

I’d say, at least 150 times. At first, you couldn’t rent it. If it was on, you would watch it. Then, of course, I would get all the different DVDs. And then—it was interesting—once I started preparing for this engagement to conduct it, I got a director’s cut where you could just listen to the orchestra without the singing. Then, of course, this fall was a big event in The Sound of Music land. There was a release of the deluxe movie edition. Huge. It’s multiple records and CDs with all this extra music, and things that were recorded that they didn’t end up using. Amazing.  

And so I went down many rabbit holes in the preparation of this—of how they actually recorded it. For example, when they did a movie musical, they always recorded the music first. They didn’t use just the seven kids. They had like six other kids singing along with them. And I found out who those kids were, and how many there were, and the order that they recorded it in, and how they chose keys for all this. And yes, we are going to add some backstage when the whole group is singing. 

When did you first see the musical?  

I saw it in Pittsburgh at a place called the Civic Arena, which—think Toyota Center. And we had nosebleed seats. It would have been ’68-ish. I hated it, because you couldn’t see anything. And it was just terrible. But then, my high school choir director bought me, as a gift, the piano/vocal score to the musical, which I didn’t even know existed. And then I would just sit at the piano constantly and play the whole show. It was like, my god. And there were these songs that are in the musical but not the movie that I didn’t know, which we’ll be doing. I was like, what are these? In the musical, there are two songs that Elsa and Max sing that they don’t even sing in the movie. They sing ‘No Way to Stop It’ and ‘How Can Love Survive?’ 

Which do you love more, the movie or the musical?  

They’re different beasts. The idea to do the movie on location in Salzburg was brilliant. The two things that make it great are the travelogue of Salzburg and the casting of Julie Andrews. With both the movie and the musical—the first half is lighthearted, and the second half becomes more dark. And in the movie, they wanted to film the Nazi soldiers marching through the square in Salzburg. And at first, the town said, no, we’re trying to forget that. So the director said to them, then I think what we’ll do is use actual news footage. So then they let them march through—the Nazis. In the musical, the Nazism is, I think, more frightening. And the reason the captain, who’s opposed to the Nazis, decides not to marry Elsa is because of their political differences. In the movie, she leaves him because she realizes he’s in love with Maria. But in the musical, it’s really about, we’re on different sides of this, politically. 

I understand you’ve visited Salzburg?   

Two summers ago, on an HGO scouting trip, Khori Dastoor asked me to go to Salzburg. So in booking this trip, the first thing I did was book the Sound of Music tour, besides going to the Salzburg Festival. And so I took the Sound of Music tour. (scrolling through phone for photos) Here’s me in front of the gazebo where they do ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen.’ And there’s the church where they got married.  

Here’s where they do the ‘Do-Re-Mi’ sequence. Now, this is the end of ‘Do-Re-Mi.’ The steps are right there. And the end of the tour was on these steps. At the end of the tour, I thought, what do I have to lose? These people don’t know me. I don’t care. To the whole bus, I said, all right, who would like to reenact the end of ‘Do-Re-Mi?’ And a bunch of people raised their hands. And I said, okay, we’ll do it. So I cast them, and we did the end of it on the steps. And people applauded afterwards. 

And who were you? 

I did Maria. Yes. Yes, I did. So then I went up to the Nonnberg Abbey, which was not on the tour but is still in existence. This is the abbey—and it’s in the movie—where the real Maria was a postulant. (sharing the photo) There’s me in front of the abbey. And there’s different graves there. 

Also, a number of summers ago, I made a pilgrimage to the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Vermont. Maria von Trapp and the captain are buried there—they chose Stowe because when you’re up there, it looks like Austria. So I’ve been to their graves, and they have edelweiss planted there. It was amazing.  

And now you get to conduct the musical for the first time.  

I have relatives coming from West Coast, East Coast—all over the United States. I have a girl from my high school band who sat next to me. She was also head majorette. She and her husband are flying in to see this because she knows how much I love The Sound of Music. I’ve not seen her since high school.  

What should audiences know, going in, about the musical?  

The hard thing in doing the show as a musical is, you will not get the cinematography from the movie. You end up focusing much more on the people. I think that’s the hardest thing to get past for people who are expecting to see the movie. People have to treat them differently, and see them as separate things. It’s live theater. 

The original show on Broadway, there were some very significant opera singers in the nuns’ chorus. Tatiana Troyanos, who went on to be a big star at the Met, was in the chorus. And Patricia Brooks, who became a very famous Traviata Violetta at City Opera, was in the chorus of this. So the people in the chorus, at that time, at Broadway theaters, were trained classical singers.  

As we know, this was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final musical. And really, in many ways, the end of them was the end of the golden age of musicals, because when you got into the ’60s, there was a switch into, you know, Hair. It changed then. 

Besides you at the podium, why should audiences come to this? 

Oh, there’s 15 million reasons. Let’s start with these iconic songs that people know, all the way from “The Sound of Music,” to “Do, a Deer,” to “Climb Every Mountain.” These are songs that people have grown up with.  

And I do think there’s relevance in this story, of people who are saying, “There’s a problem, but if we just don’t say anything, it’ll be fine,” for the grown-ups. Kids won’t get the Nazi storyline. And they don’t need to get that part. There’s something for every age level.  

But my parents, especially my father, who was in World War Two—that was a huge trigger for him. You know, HGO’s doing this Military Appreciation Day at one of the shows. I have my father’s medals from the war, including his Purple Heart. I’ve already gotten them out. I’m going to put them in my pocket for that performance. So I think, on different levels, people will get different things out of it.  

Is this the realization of a dream? 

Well, it’s interesting. The warm-up—we were supposed to do The Sound of Music during the pandemic, and then we had to cancel. So we did an outdoor singalong at the University of Houston football stadium, which I conducted and was great fun. But the ironic part was, I was on the 50-yard line, and I kept thinking, I wish my father was still alive, because this would have been a dream come true for him. You know, he was this football coach. My brothers both played college football. Here I am on the 50-yard line conducting songs from The Sound of Music. It’s like all my worlds came together suddenly. That’s all I kept thinking. Here I am on the 50-yard line, but doing what I want to do.