NBC TO AIR SOUND OF MUSIC SPECIAL — LIVE

NBC plans to experiment again with a live television production, this time with a live telecast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, it announced on Friday. The production will be staged by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who say that it will resemble the original stage production more than the movie that starred Julie Andrews (which is arguably one of the most-viewed film musicals of all time). “What we want to do…is to give audiences a completely fresh experience of this great Tony Award-winning stage musical in the form of a classic television event, combined with the spontaneity of a live performance,” Zadan said in a statement. “All of the actors will be singing live; there will be no lip-synching to pre-recordings.” NBC executives are also no doubt hoping that viewers will want to watch it live, too. Live television shows avert the kind of commercial-skipping that plague the networks nowadays. Zadan and Meron have become the de facto go-to guys for TV musicals. They currently produced NBC’s Smash and previously had produced TV versions of such Broadway classics as Meredith Willson’s The Music Man; Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Charles Strouse’s Annie, and Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy.