This one should probably get its own book.

The art of creating live television broadcasts reached its peak in the mid-to-late 50's and continued well into the 60's, before dribbling away. By 2013, most of the secrets had been lost. Producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan brought together a great group of theater professionals, led by Rob Ashford, and a group of TV folks who knew live TV, at least in the context of Saturday Night Live and awards shows, but knew nothing about musicals.

We had to argue for rehearsal time and for proper rehearsal space. I did a one-day roundtrip to Nashville to work with Carrie Underwood (NBC wouldn't pay for me to spend the night), just to talk through the music and find keys. She was delightful, and incredibly game, and had never played been onstage in any theatrical context. (I mean, I could argue that every time she sang, she was inhabiting a character that was an aspect of herself, but that's different from playing an existing role). We mostly surrounded her with seasoned theater veterans, and set off into the unknown.

Some specific memories:

-- For the opening sequence, I conducted the nuns (all Broadway vets) while standing just off-camera on a ladder in the dark, wearing white gloves three sizes too small so they could see my hands. (The gloves were a very last-minute addition, and they couldn't find XL).

-- The day before the broadcast, Audra decided she didn't want the intro music for "Climb Ev'ry Mountain". She'd just… start. Easy with a conductor, but here the orchestra was on pre-record. As the song cue approached, we were increasingly anxious about it in the control booth. Magically, she came in perfectly on pitch, and playback operator Mark Weglinski (aka "Wedge") nailed the downbeat without so much as a preparatory breath from Audra.

-- Everyone wanted to toss Gretl off a cliff.

-- We pre-recorded all of the music in a way that we could manipulate it digitally with the least fuss. Tempos changed, music into and out of commercials was created and added last minute when they decided they needed more commercial breaks. Rehearsals in the TV studio were run off my MacBook Air through GarageBand. I didn't know any better. We put my laptop, a synth keyboard, and two big speakers on a rolling cart, which associate choreographer Sarah O'Gleby dubbed the "Taco Cart", a name which I believe has stuck and transferred to countless other TV productions.

-- The sound mixer had never done a theatrical event before and didn't really comprehend how to bring mics up and down depending on who was talking. He also never understood character names as opposed to actor names, and referred to Sister Margaretta as Sister Margarita. All these constantly open mics created mountains of feedback and noise. My mother-in-law asked, after watching the show, if we were broadcasting next to ocean because she could hear the waves…

-- Rob Ashford had some excellent ideas of how to remind viewers that this was a live event, all of which were shot down. My favorite was the idea of starting the broadcast with a helicopter-style shot, just like the movie, that would have shown the Bethpage TV studio from the air, then swooped down through the halls of dressing rooms and backstage and finally landing on Maria as she crested the hill singing the title song. Brilliant. I mentioned this to my friend, Jon Tolins, who wrote the same concept into the beginning of Grease Live! a few years later.

-- I realized that The Sound of Music is a religion, not a piece of musical theater, and everyone, I mean everyone, knows the movie note-for-note and word-for-word. We were destined to disappoint no matter how polished it was. And no other live theater broadcast would ever reach an audience as vast as TSOM did.

-- I also realized that there's no point in doing a live broadcast unless the viewers can feel the same anxious thrill of the people doing it live. In TV, we've become so used to having light set-ups, and multiple camera angles, and sound mixes edited in post that unless we're constantly reminded that it's live, it just falls flat. This is why the must successful live telecast was Superstar, which was clearly filmed in front of a live audience. You need the audience to be psychologically invested in that sense of "anything can happen".