FIRST NIGHT: Pure-voiced and girlish, the new Maria lacks passion

After Connie Fisher, who leapt to instant stardom in the role of Maria, that would-be nun who wouldn't stop singing, her successor, Summer Strallen, comes as something of an anti-climax.

When Jeremy Sams's fresh-faced revival premiered in November 2006 Fisher's governess challenged and overwhelmed memories of Julie Andrews on celluloid.

Dispensing with Andrews's purified air of wholesomeness, her chilly sexual allure and humour-free jollity, Fisher offered a far more complex and engaging character.

Her quirky, far younger Maria, a bit of a rebel without a cause, viewed the weird von Trapp household with quirky amusement and the loveless children with compassionate sympathy.

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She humanised the role and kept it free of glucose sentiment.

Her at first unspoken, but passionate attraction to von Trapp gave the musical-what it had hitherto lacked - an interesting sexual dynamic.

Strallen has something of the Connie Fisher approach. Looking barely out of her teens, far too spontaneous and tom-girlish for a sacrificial life-time of Send in the Nuns, she cuts an attractive, exuberant figure, both with Margaret Preece's fine, full-throated Mother Abbess and in the von Trapp villa, which resembles a stately mansion in Robert Jones's design.

Strallen's voice, though sometimes a touch overcome by the 20-strong band, sounds pure enough for Do-Re-Mi and My Favourite Things.

Yet when she comes face to face with Simon Burke's Captain von Trapp nothing happens. For both of them it is a case of true indifference at first sight.

Burke's von Trapp, tightly buttoned in a double breasted suit and equipped with a speaking voice that sounds as if trained in the Noel Coward Academy of affected diction, suffers less from a grief that has made him a paternal martinet than an icy stiffness, a chronic arthritis of the personality.

He sings Edelweiss with a fine ardour that he never visits upon Strallen, who returns his remoteness with a dispassion of her own.

No sexual sparks fly or even take off. When Maria hears the Baron is poised for marriage her face does not fall, let alone collapse.

A crucial element of Sams's production has vanished. Admittedly the lonesome children appeal in word and song; changes of handsome scenes come with effortless ease. The Nazi menace, though, no longer looms that dangerous.

This muted Sound of Music has rather lost its cutting edge.