Von Trapp Family Singers Go Indie

Von Trapp Family Singers Go Indie October 4, 2015

Lavanya Ramanathan:

The modern-day Trapp family singers were hanging out on the craggy patio of a D.C. cafe, each wearing some variation on skinny jeans, bangs and combat boots.

Melanie, 25, had wrapped herself in a leopard-print trench coat, while Sofi, 27, was clad in a cropped red leather jacket. Amanda, 24, was in head-to-toe black. And then there was August, just 21, who let his hair do all the statement-making, his bleached-blond wisps of his bangs swooping over one eye, Bieber-style.

“What,” Amanda asked wryly. “You were expecting lederhosen?”

Well, uh, yeah. But could you blame us?

The musical foursome known as the von Trapps is the spawn of the wholesome, singing Austrian clan of “The Sound of Music” fame. Their grandfather, Werner, was one of those von Trapps, who skipped around the world in the 1930s and ’40s as the Trapp Family Singers, belting out madrigals and the folk songs of their native Austria for audiences shell-shocked by successive wars.

The older generation of singing von Trapps became the very loose source material for a Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, and then for one of the most-watched movies of all time, an epic that could give a Bollywood movie a run for its money with its romance, musical numbers, Alpine scenery and Nazi bad guys.


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