CAMPING OUT : 'Sing-A-Long Sound of Music'.

Sing-A-Long Sound of Music modifies Robert Wise's 1965 film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical for audience participation, a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The phenomenon began three years ago in London, hit New York last fall, and now is making its way around America. In Sing-A-Long Sound of Music, song lyrics scroll across the bottom of the screen. And that's only the beginning. This is also Dress-A-Long Sound of Music, and Joke-A-Long, too. The spectacle's cult appeal takes in families with kids, forty-five-year-old women nostalgic about their girlhood adoration of Julie Andrews, and drag-queen nuns. You've come to the unexpected cultural crossing where Christopher Street meets Main Street.

At the Bushnell concert hall in Hartford, Connecticut, it's a Saturday night show, and the crowded lobby showcases odd transformations. Women remove coats to reveal dirndls, while their husbands slip into the men's room to emerge, abashed, in lederhosen. I speak with three women who have adorned their heads, respectively, with breadsticks, little plastic tublets of table marmalade, and a garland of Lipton's tea bags. "Are those crackers in your hair?" I ask one. She looks at me with pity. "No," she says. "We're 'tea, a drink with jam and bread.'" Oops. Cognoscenti would catch the textual reference. Behind us, meanwhile, a big hiss and boo goes up. The Nazis have entered--a guy in a black trench coat, a woman dressed as an SS captain. A little further on, a group is practicing a round of "Do-Re-Me." A TV cameraman videotapes a guy in red suspenders and a Tyrolean hat. I can hear someone yodeling.

Inside the theater, our wimple-wearing emcee, "Sister Kate" (in reality New York City comedian Kate Rigg) drolly informs us this is our chance to celebrate "one of the very greatest American musical comedies set in Austria ever." She acquaints us with the sing-a-long rules and rituals. Raise your arms high ("the international symbol for really big hills!") whenever you see mountains. Feel free to answer all rhetorical questions in the lyrics (for example, "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"). Boo all evil characters--like the baroness, who contends with Maria for Captain von Trapp's favor, or the villainous Nazi pol. We might also toss in a few "foreshadowing boos," she adds, for characters who will become Nazis. We all send up a lusty practice boo.

"Yes," she says. "Bone tingling."

We practice cheering at Maria, and barking at Rolf (Rolf! Rolf!), Liesel's blond boyfriend. And for little Gretel, youngest of the Trapp family brood, we rehearse a sound like the one you make over a cute baby or puppy who is unhappy. "And the cuter and patheticker she gets," Sister Kate tells us, "the cuter and patheticker you get." Five hundred people make the Awwwwww sound. Sister Kate beams. "It warms the cockles of my wimple," she quips.

Each of us carries a "fun pack" issued at the door--a plastic bag containing cinematic interactivity aids. There's a sprig of edelweiss, and a little square of fabric to hold up when the inspiration strikes Maria to make the children new clothes from the curtains. And last but not least, a popping-champagne noisemaker; Sister Kate instructs us to pull the string at the moment Maria and Captain von Trapp first kiss.

"And don't pop early," she warns. "That can be very disappointing to women."

There's a pre-show parade of costumes across the stage. Most incarnate lines from the songs--"When the bee stings," "doorbells and sleighbells," and so on. First prize goes to a guy named Bill, dressed as curtains. ("Keep your scissors back!" he warns.) A tiny toddler dressed as a nun scoots across the stage, followed by a trio of nuns in drag who introduce themselves as "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence." Never has such potentially raunchy role-playing seemed like such good clean fun. "You were a brilliant audience," Sister Kate tells us, departing. "Now go ahead and enjoy one of the best movies ever made."

And enjoy it we do. During the opening panoramic shots of snowy Alps, people raise their arms and call out, Maria! Mariiiiiia! It's like a revival meeting, this hysterical, hilarious pouring-forth of our cinematic collective unconscious, cheers mixing with whoops and shrieks as Julie Andrews sings her way across that high mountain meadow. Sing-a-long Sound of Music demolishes the decorum of movie watching, freeing the cinematic id in us all. It invites us to join the melodrama, keying our responses to the silly excess of the movie itself. "Maria," the mother superior at the convent intones, "it seems to be the will of God that you leave us"--and wails of mock sadness pour forth all around. Or when Rolf flirtatiously sings to sixteen-year-old Liesel, "Your life is an empty page that men will want to write on," someone pops a popper, and laughter ripples through the theater.

Some of the wisecracking anticipates a coming action or line, as when Maria wanders into the room Captain von Trapp keeps closed--where he and his beloved late wife used to entertain--and someone yells, "Look behind you!" just before the camera cuts to Christopher Plummer standing there, glowering. But mostly it's about partisanship, a ritual call-and-response of approval or dismay. We hiss at the baroness's catty condescension to Maria. Applaud when the dashing Christopher Plummer tears up the Nazi flag. Go wild when mother superior hits the high C on "Till you find your dream!" And we passionately follow each turn in the romance, culminating at last in the long-awaited scene of Maria and Captain von Trapp in the garden. "Is there something you wanted?" she asks innocently. (Pop! goes a noisemaker.) "You can't marry someone," the captain muses, "when you're in love with someone else, can you?" Pop! Pop! Pop! Mounting hysteria in the audience. Kiss her, you fool! a voice shouts.

"This is the most fun I've had in a long time," the guy next to me says.

"Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment," Susan Sontag wrote in "Notes on Camp," her immensely influential 1964 essay. "Camp is a tender feeling....What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures." Paradoxically, camp revels in what it parodies; thus the affectionate mockery of Sing-A-Long Sound of Music, its attitude of worshipful irreverence. "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously," Christopher Isherwood noted a decade before Sontag. "You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it."

But what to make of the fun of Sing-A-Long Sound of Music? "Wave your edelweiss to distract the Nazis," Sister Kate instructs, "so the von Trapps can make their escape." From one perspective, to boo and hiss at Nazis, and wave fake flowers to facilitate a getaway, is to risk grotesquely trivializing the material. Yet there's a way in which this radical innocence suggests the same pointed contrast of styles--Rooseveltian cheer (or Churchillian humor) versus the deadly earnestness of Hitler--that divided the Allied sensibility from the Axis one, our democratic breeziness from their fascist pomposity. To be sure, camp will change the subject on a moral argument every time. It's absurd to divide people into good and bad, Oscar Wilde remarked; people are either charming or tedious.

The charm of Sing-A-Long Sound of Music puts irony to the service of an ultimate innocence. Camp, it has been said, is first and foremost a second childhood, and the sing-a-long form invites us to playact our way back into the child's point of view. All villainy is the same, whether the scheming Nazi or the scheming would-be stepmother; as for character development, there is none--camp, like opera and like a child's imagination, conceives character as unchanging and essential ("a state of continual incandescence," as Sontag wrote.) Sing-A-Long Sound of Music celebrates both the simplicity of romance--when Plummer breaks into song with his children, allowing music back into his sorrowing widower's life, the audience cheers--and, at another level, the sublimity of cinematic illusion making. During the scene in which the Trapp family hides at night in the convent graveyard as the villains search for them with flashlights, a group in the back of the theater pulled out flashlights. The beams played across the theater and the screen itself, an oddly thrilling conflation of the real and the make-believe. For a moment, Sing-A-Long Sound of Music was every movie, only more so; it felt as if the silly, glorious artifice of it had laid bare the heart of moviemaking itself.