The Sound of Music Live!

The "American Idol" winner doesn’t have any theater experience, and she went on to do a lot better in the singing department than in the acting one.... If someone should be banned from singing ever again, it should be Moyer.... Cannily the producers surrounded our rookies with fairly charming kids and a formidable array of Broadway pros.

Carrie Underwood isn’t an actor and Stephen Moyer isn’t a singer and together they lacked chemistry as Maria and Captain Von Trapp..... The highpoint of the evening was Audra McDonald’s rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” and Laura Benanti as the Baroness lit up the screen.

It wasn’t a singalong or a sacrilege or a slavish, shameless remake. It was a live performance of a legendary musical that felt muted and a little sad.

[Underwood's] limitations as an actor were particularly obvious when she was sharing scenes with the show's two best assets: Tony winners Audra McDonald as the Mother Abbess and Laura Benanti as the Baroness.

The supporting cast was strong: Laura Benanti was appropriately sultry as Elsa Von Hottie, while Christian Borle was appropriately hammy as Max Detweiler and someone should find a way to have McDonald sing audiences into every commercial break.... And yet, without Underwood and Moyer selling us on this legendary love story, The Sound of Music Live plays like very expensive karaoke.

For the most part [Directors Beth McCarthy-Miller and Rob Ashford] couldn’t make the story sing between the musical numbers, and the tingle one can get from a live theatrical experience didn’t materialize as filtered through the remove of TV.

As a stage actress, there was no way to regard [Underwood] as anything but an amateur--good enough, certainly, to convey the meaning of her lines, and sometimes better than that, but lacking weight and substance and the shadings she can bring to a song.... Stephen Moyer had the anger and the stiffness the role certainly requires, but not the humor it needs.... It was helpful, if you wanted to help, to regard this as really terrific community theater, rather than something professional and less than successful.