By Susan Green

"Emily my dearest, always a pleasure to see you," Bill Villemaire gushes when Emily Anderson walks into the room. His gallant, old-fashioned greeting seems still in character with the role he portrays in a touring production of The Sound of Music. As the upscale Captain von Trapp, Villemaire is part of an itinerant theatrical troupe directed by Anderson, who also provides instrumental accompaniment on accordion. They do not tackle the entire show, however, concentrating instead on selected sequences and songs.

Even an abbreviated version of the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical is a triumph for this 15-member cast, comprising people with developmental disabilities from Champlain Vocational Services in Colchester. They have been performing at a different site every Wednesday for three weeks and remarkably, will finish their season with a May 16 appearance at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe -- where the Austrian family depicted in fiction wound up after fleeing the Nazis in the 1940s.

The Stowe finale caps a long process for the 34-year-old Anderson, a veteran of Glover's Bread and Puppet Theater and an instructor for the past three years with the Can Do Arts Program, under the umbrella of Very Special Arts of Vermont. She has been working with The Sound of Music cast and crew intermittently since the fall. "This is so much fun for them, it builds their self-confidence and they get an opportunity to make a contribution to society," Anderson explains. "The purpose of the program is to bring people normally hidden away... into the community and give them a structure in which they can shine."

Despite some missed cues and evidence of stage fright during last week's performance at the Mater Christi School in Burlington, the amateur thespians did indeed shine. Many in the audience of about 200 students sang along on "My Favorite Things" and "Edelweiss," then had a volley of questions waiting when the cast members reassembled after taking their bows.

"Did you see the movie?" one adolescent wanted to know. Villemaire told them he watches the video every night. "Was this hard to do?" another child asked. The star acknowledged that some of the characters were "a little bit off-center."

To say the least.

Cindy Van Horn makes such a shy Maria -- the theoretically spunky novitiate who becomes governess to the Captain's seven children -- she had to be coaxed away from the wings again and again. As the von Trapp's housekeeper in an apron and straw hat, April Brewster skipped around the stage with glee. Marc Porreca gave the Baroness "a classic commedia dell'arte" flourish, according to Anderson. Wrapped in a long feather boa he was strictly high-camp while enacting the part of Maria's rival in a romantic love triangle.

Accordion in hand, Anderson stood on the side to narrate the proceedings. She prompted any performer who forgot a line or, when all else failed, recited the dialogue herself. Scripts were beside the point. A few cast members cannot read; others do not really talk. Yet, somehow it all fit together in a wonderfully wacky way.

Anderson found rehearsals for this ambitious endeavor a true challenge. "We had a lot of talks about the style of the show," She says. "You don't always know if you're getting through to people with disabilities -- they often don't make eye contact -- but I always proceed from the assumption that you are."

Anderson's affinity for this kind of career stems from her maternal grandparents, both deaf, who "had a different way of existing in the world that was as full and vibrant as the lives of hearing people," she recalls. "So, I've always been interested in communication. To me, helping the developmentally disabled population get self-esteem is political work. It's a chance for them to express their issues. O just provide the forum for them to do that."

The culmination of a lifelong dream, The Sound of Music creates a happy set of coincidences for the 44-year-old Villemaire. "My school did the play in 1967," he says, referring to the now defunct Bennett C. Douglas School for people with developmental disabilities in the Queen City. "I was Johann then. We did it at Mater Christi."

The "we" from the 1960s includes current members of the company who either act or serve as stagehands: Brewster, Michael Moody and Tara Whitcomb. They have known each other for more than three decades, a kind of madcap drama collective devoted to a certain World War II story with a fairytale ending. It was Villemaire's idea to do The Sound of Music again. Spurred by fond memories of the place, he and his former classmates urged Anderson to put Mater Christi on the touring schedule.

"They don't usually have any contact with that age group," she says, referring to the young teens. "So I think it was very exciting for them. After the show, we always do this little cheer in a circle with our hands in the center and, at Mater Christi, the word the chose to say was 'Success!'"

Success for this group, representing a range of developmental levels, seemed enthusiasm and acceptance coming from the kids. "I like breaking down the barriers," Anderson says. "It's great to make this population accessible to other people, even if we are doing a show that is slightly silly."

"Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens" -- the musical Maria von Trapp how much fun it can be to act silly sometimes.

Villemaire's mother Theresa, remembers attending concerts by the real-life von Trapps while he was growing up in Vermont. In addition her late husband Donald installed the cash registers at the Trapp Family Lodge when it was under construction half a century ago. "He knew Maria very well," she says.

"If the weather's good enough for us to perform outside, it'll be near the graves of Captain and Maria," Anderson notes.

The winds must remain calm if the sets -- sheets painted in a rough, almost Bread and puppet fashion -- have any hope of not blowing away. Making them was part of the project for Anderson and her eager players. They also developed the script, such as it is, from their recollections of the 1967 movie.

"They would tell me what they considered the most important moments in the show," she says. "The Captain blowing a whistle to command his seven children, and the Baroness sending Maria back to the convent, were significant to them. Bill had certain lines he wanted to include, like: 'Of all the novice candidates, Maria is the least likely to succeed.' It was a big mish-mash of images at first, but people had ver strong opinions of what to use."

The props also drew a good deal of attention. "Bill designed the car he calls Hasta la Vega," Anderson says of the cardboard red convertible coupe the Captain mock-drives in several scenes.

"It's the Edsel, I would say," Villemaire quips.

Even boiled down to its essence, this was not an easy play to do in such a short span -- they had only about one hour a week off and on since autumn-- and with very little funding. "We didn't have time to really work on the vocals," she says. "This project really burst its britches in many ways."

Anderson has quite a bit more breathing room in another part-time job as the director of the Awareness Theater, an ongoing arts group of developmentally disabled adults from Howard Community Services who are able to function fairly independently. "They're pretty polished by comparison," says Anderson, a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio. "We have a play, Pigs of Oz, that we recently did at PS 122 [an East Village performance space] in New York City. With Awareness, I'm able to think really big and follow through. [The performers] are even talking about taking the show to Chicago, on a tour of New York State, Australia. When they start talking things usually happen."

Anderson's third paying gig involves leading a workshop made up of senior citizens who participate in the Hardwick-based Grassroots Art and Community Effort. In addition, she is a member of "my own true theater company," the Deep Mountain Group in West Glover -- her old Bread and Puppet stomping grounds from 1989 to 1996. This company has been touring periodically since late 1999 with MADSCIENTIST.COM, which she describes as a play about Genetic engineering, sex and revolution." Anderson also plays accordion and trombone in Irresistible Predator, a seven-member band that performs with Deep Mountain.

At the end of May, she and a fellow puppeteer will head for Korea to mount a show with a group of women near Seoul. Anderson has also been invited to conduct a theater workshop at a disability conference while in the country.

But first, she must help make a cultural contribution to the Trapp Family Lodge, where even a minimalist Sound of Music is likely to remind the audience that the hills are still alive.

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