Watch Katrina Lenk’s Haunting Rendition of The Sound of Music’s ‘Something Good’

Katrina Lenk is the kind of musical-theater performer who can take a song you think you know and transform it into something new, whether she’s gender-flipping Fiddler or Company, or in this case, revising a love song from The Sound of Music with an eerie, reorchestrated video. The clip is the latest from the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization’s R&H Goes Pop! series. “I was overwhelmed with the amount of choices in the catalogue,� Lenk told Vulture of her song choice, “so I called my best friend, and we’re both fans of The Sound of Music and watch it every year, and she suggested ‘Something Good.’�

Richard Rodgers wrote the song for the film version of the musical, and it appears as a duet between Maria and Captain von Trapp, replacing the stage version’s “An Ordinary Couple.� “It’s this little sweet song in the middle of this vast movie,� Lenk said. “I became obsessed with the ideas in it, this simply put and bittersweet way of trying to explain the massive idea of redemption. Which then started to remind me of an old Western for some reason, and then I just started tinkering.�

The result features music direction and arrangements by James Sampliner, with Lenk both singing and playing the violin, David A. Nelson on the guitar, Jared Schonig on the drums, and Alexandra Eckhardt on the double bass. The video, directed by Ellen Maynard of the Fleet NYC and filmed in October 2019, places Lenk herself in a little beam of light in a big, empty space, performing choreography by Sara Gibbons. “We wanted to tell a story [with the choreography], but we also wanted it to be somewhat up for interpretation,� Lenk said. “I know what we were going for, but I also value whatever experience a viewer might have when they see something, so I just want to leave that up for interpretation, because I’m really interested in that.�