Alexander Hanson

Alexander Hanson in The Sound of Music

Alexander Hanson might best be described as the proper saviour of The Sound of Music—the leading man drafted into Jeremy Sams’ production when Simon Shepherd departed the show after two previews. Playing Captain Von Trapp, the widower and onetime naval officer who gets to sing that most beloved of songs, “Edelweiss,” Hanson, who turns 46 on April 28, didn’t have time to fret about the assignment: “Prevarication, “ as he puts it, “lasts a very short time. The understudy went and did the Monday show, and they wanted me on by Wednesday.” The following Wednesday, there Hanson was at last November’s opening night at the Palladium, giving an accomplished, properly felt performance and more than holding his own against TV darling Connie Fisher—the production’s raison d’etre—not to mention seven stage children of varying degrees of adorableness. With Hanson signed at least through September, the show is yet another feather in the diverse cap of a wide-ranging actor whose credits encompass numerous Noel Coward one-acts at Chichester (last season’s Tonight at 8.30 ), Max Stafford-Clark’s much-debated production of Talking To Terrorists, six months in the original West End company of We Will Rock You (“that was a hoot; I did it because I knew Robert de Niro was one of the producer so he’d have to give me half a minute of his time”), and such leading man gigs as Alex in Aspects of Love (opposite Kathryn Evans as Rose) and Joe in Sunset Boulevard opposite the Norma Desmonds of both Elaine Paige and Petula Clark. Off stage, he’s been married to the actress Samantha Bond since 1989 (the two, for what it’s worth, did not meet doing a show), and the couple have two children, Molly and Tom. Raised near Nottingham, Hanson trained at London’s Guildhall, arriving there when he was 21 having decided against earlier thoughts of being a hotelier. (He had been earmarked to study at Cornell University’s famous hotel school.) Theatre.com caught up with Hanson one Friday afternoon, with show time still several hours away. Good-natured and genial, the actor spoke openly about the pressures inherent in coming into a pre-existing show at the last minute as well as a career that includes such legendary West End flops as Matador, with Stefanie Powers and John Barrowman, as well as successes like the Trevor Nunn Merchant of Venice (he was Bassanio to Henry Goodman's Shylock), Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (as the third-ever Septimus Hodge), and arguably the biggest musical success in London at the moment—namely, The Sound of Music.

It must be nice, doing the show every night, now that you and the cast have settled into the run.
Yes, certainly. It’s par for the course that after a couple of months, you settle into a way of telling the story, though it’s not been without its dramas. Connie and her vocal problems kept us on our toes, and now we’ve got Aoife [Mulholland] in the frame doing Monday nights and Wednesday matinees, so there’s been a degree of adapting that has gone on. [Laughs.] But they pay me a lot of money, so it’s worth the trouble.

And it’s no doubt valuable to be able to say that you could help anchor a production at such short notice.
That’s true. It’s nice to be able to have a few strings to one’s bow in his game—particularly in this game.

How did The Sound of Music come about for you?
I got a call from Ann Skinner, who was then working at Really Useful—Andrew [Lloyd Webber’s] right hand at the time, who’s an old friend. She basically rang—she said—just to gauge my interest. I wasn’t sure, actually, to be honest. I thought, ‘Oh God, you know you’re not going to get any rehearsal, though you also know you can sort of get through.’ But it’s later in the run when the lack of rehearsal kicks in. It’s very difficult, and I know that can sound very self-indulgent, but rehearsals are obviously there for a reason, and the more you can investigate your character and your relationship with the other characters on stage, the more it pays dividends in performance. It’s like creating a garden. You cultivate that garden and put in all the compost and manure and from that the garden can grow; the more you put in individually, the better those shrubs and bushes can be. It’s the same with rehearsals as regards the more risks you take initially, but of course I didn’t have that luxury. So any choices I’ve made every night have been in front of 2500 people. It’s very difficult to do it retrospectively.

Still, at least you get that immediate gratification—and response.
If it’s up there and working, the audiences are happy, so you finesse it by yourself. It’s rather like people who’ve never been to university, which I haven’t, and you maybe regret it later in life.

What sold you, then, on saying yes?
I think it was my wife screaming up the stairs, ‘School fees and mortgage!’ Though Sam hates it when I say school fees, because she likes to pretend to be a Socialist. [Laughs.] I got the call on a Sunday and I thought, OK, and we did the deal at lunchtime and I went to see [director] Jeremy [Sams] that evening—with the press night 10 days away.

Connie Fisher and Alexander Hanson on opening night of The Sound of Music

That must have been unusual, to say the least. 
Oh my God. I’ve got two left feet; these things take me ages. I had to learn the songs, and there were a couple that I wasn’t so familiar with. I went to see the show on the Monday and they wanted me in on the Wednesday. I was so close to a breakdown—it was too much, too pressured. And also, like most actors, you want to be the best you can be and you sort of know that you can’t be in that short period of time. So the biggest thing I had to do was be kind to myself and say, ‘Listen, it doesn’t matter. Do the best you can.’

What’s your memory six months later of the press night?
I’ve sort of blocked it out; it was painful, that—like a state of emergency. I felt I was on standby the whole time.

But if you’ll allow me to tell you, you got good reviews.
I’m one of those actors who says he doesn’t read reviews, but mostly I really don’t, which is quite a liberating thing. I remember when I was in The Villain's Opera at the National, which was quite a misconceived piece that we all knew was going to be a car crash, and there was no way I was going to read those reviews. And then I walked into the canteen and looked at the faces around me, and I felt quite liberated that I hadn’t. Since then, I’ve worked very hard at not reading them. I genuinely don’t until much later.

Does your family read them for you?
Samantha read them for The Sound of Music. What I did get was, ‘It’s all fine. It’s OK.’ But with all due respect, I’m not sure in any case that I’m going to take advice from a critic, especially in that context—a lot of it was instinct. No, all of it was instinct.