8 DECEMBER 2007, Page 18

Full circle

Sir: Miranda Sawyer should not have included The Sound of Music in her list of 'films turned into live shows' (Diary, 24 November). It was, of course, the other way round: a live show turned into a film. The Sound of Music, the last Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, opened on Broadway in 1959 and ran for thousands of performances in both New York and London before eventually becoming a film in 1965.

The film was hugely successful, but still no more than what Halliwell's Film Guide has called a 'slightly muted, very handsome version of an enjoyably old-fashioned stage musical with splendid tunes'.

Alexander Chancellor Towcester, Northamptonshire