It’s interesting to see a new production of The Sound of Music is on at the National Theatre (a somewhat misleading name for it) in St Kilda and it has The Voice finalist Tayla Dwyer in the plum role of Maria in which Julie Andrews enthralled the world back in 1964, especially the female half of it because somehow this Salzburg story of the young novice who falls for the dashing Captain von Trapp in the context of the spectre of Nazism has every young girl and her grandmother yodelling with glee. Tayla Dwyer mentions her own late nanna as a keen enthusiast. And that’s a reminder that some fraction of extant baby boomers remember the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical before Julie Andrews when you could see at what was then Garnet H. Carroll’s Princess Theatre with that lustrous-voiced Australian soprano June Bronhill, late of Sadler’s Wells Opera in London, bringing the hills alive.

The current production encourages sing along in the manner of the cinema screenings where mothers and daughters belt out the tunes in a huge crescendo of sisterhood older than that term but no less intense for that. It’s a fascinating phenomenon which while sometimes terrifying blokes young and old speaks to some deep womanly need. It’s too easy to be snooty about this and say that the legendary city in Austria should be forever associated with Bruno Walter conducting Mozart and Max Reinhardt directing those public performances of Jedermann, the German version of Everyman, which has over the years featured German language theatre legends like Maximilian Schell and Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Well, everywhere is many things and it’s worth remembering that when Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote Oklahoma! in 1943 they were deliberately folkifying the musical: songs like ‘Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’’ and ‘I’m Just a Girl who Cain’t Say No’ are less sophisticated than the crushed ice and cocktails of the songs Rodgers wrote with Lorenz Hart. Even Cole Porter’s Anything Goes – for all the brilliance of songs like ‘You’re the Top’ – was a set of sparkling numbers in search of a book (never mind P.G. Wodehouse’s contribution). And Rodgers & Hammerstein invested in the book with bells on. They made the great leap of writing songs which told the story of the drama they depicted through music. When Billy Bigelow in Carousel comes out with his seven-minute aria of perplexity (‘My Boy Bill’ which turns into the brooding delicacy of having a daughter) the effect is nothing if not dramatic.

And that’s true of Mary Martin singing ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’ and her stage partner – the Don Giovanni of Bruno Walter, no less, according to Lord Harewood the finest ever – the very great Italian bass Ezio Pinza in South Pacific.

So it’s probably a good idea not to be superior about The Sound of Music. One of that troupe of von Trapp veterans is with us in the form of that fine actor Nicholas Hammond (last seen playing Sam Wanamaker in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). And it’s worth remembering that the wizard behind the film of The Sound of Music was Robert Wise, the disciple of Orson Welles, who made that powerfully dramatic film of West Side Story. The apparent sweetness and light of the film is in fact a triumph of artfulness.

When Cole Porter returned to a post-Rodgers & Hammerstein type musical – with Kiss Me Kate, his Taming of the Shrew revamp, or in the mid-1950s with his film musical of Philadelphia Story, High Society (Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly) – it was with a new dramatic coherence. The same thing is true of Irving Berlin with Annie Get Your Gun which absorbed the very grand histrionic potential of Ethel Merman as did Gypsy which some people think is the very greatest of all musicals.

The musical, though, is here to stay whether you’re a fan of Stephen Sondheim (the protégé of Hammerstein, of course) or not. It’s hard surely to argue against the Ingmar Bergman-derived beauty of A Little Night Music or the pure gusto of Elaine Stritch singing ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ but you can make a case for him deconstructing the lushness of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s proto-operatics even though he was such a masterly servant of Bernstein in West Side Story.

Melbourne has seen Jonathan Larson’s Rent receive rave reviews and it is about to get a big-time revival of Wicked which evokes dazzling memories both visual and vocal. The original Broadway production of Chicago (which we’re about to get a revival of at Her Majesty’s in Melbourne) by the great Bob Fosse had Gwen Verdon as Roxie and Chita Rivera as her co-worker in killing. It’s a weird moody show full of shifts of tone and you can argue about the points of emphasis in Rob Marshall’s stridently confident 2002 film with Catherine Zeta-Jones almost too big to be believed and Renée Zellweger as Roxie.

If you had the world to choose from among actors who have played Roxie you might pick Melanie Griffith. Why? Because this apparently ditzy blonde is an actress, like Marilyn Monroe, with lightning comic timing as well as pathos.

In any case the new Chicago will be a fascination. So too will Gaslight with Geraldine Hakewell and Toby Schmidtz opening in Melbourne on 8 March though emanating from Queensland. Of course it will stir memories of that ancient 1940s film with insinuating horrors coming upon Ingrid Bergman and the great Charles Boyer, a monument of suavity and ambiguity.

On an entirely different subject, you would need to know far more than this scientifically illiterate columnist to give an educated opinion of James Bradley’s Deep Water in which the distinguished novelist looks at the oceans of our world according to the grid of what is known about climate change. What is strikingly clear is the authority of the articulation and the range of mind. At one point he cites Romain Rolland speaking to Freud about some oceanic experience and the old magus of familial horror replies that if this exists it is surely a memory of the womb. This summa of speculative science is due from Penguin/Random House in July.