Every dramatic work, of which Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music is one, has both overt and covert lessons which viewers and audiences can learn and apply in their situations for improvement of lives. While the overt lessons are easily seen, the covert ones might be quite hidden thus, require deep insights to discover them. A Critique of The Sound of Music contains the author's story of how in the space of about three hours of watching the movie in 1981, at age 10, her musical, verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial and bodily-kinesthetic innate abilities were aroused and ignited a career-dream that has now come to complete fulfillment. The work also focuses on reviewing the movie's theatricality, musicality, as well as some of its intrinsic and extrinsic educational perspectives. Exploring the theatricality and musicality of the movie led to the discovery of some relationships between them, and how these relationships can be used for utility purposes such as structuring theatrical teaching methods and approaches for pedagogical functions in Africa, especially its rural areas.

With respect to the educational thrust of the work, light is shed on a good number of significant learning-centered theories discovered to have been employed within the plot of The Sound of Music. These theories are the theories propounded by Slade, Montessori, Piaget, Gardner, Kodaly and Bloom. They are discussed in relation to some scenes in the movie. Also reviewed under an educational thrust are the sterling qualities of Maria which made her an ideal teacher. These qualities are recommended for teachers in real life educational situations to emulate for better inputs in the educational sectors of their countries. The foregoing is also delineated with the citations of relevant scenes, songs, dramatic actions and other necessary factors in the movie. In A Critique of The Sound of Music, references which are made to other comparable works are purposed to help strengthen arguments and buttress points.

A critique of The Sound of Music contains qualitative and quantitative results of quasi-experimental study carried out on four sets of students - four classes of primary school students learning to sing a musical scale. The study borders on the use of The Sound of Music to teach the singing of a major scale in an academic music class. Two out of the four classes served as the experimental groups, while the remaining two served as the control groups. The results obtained from the study created a solid footing for a positive inference on the use of the movie to effectively teach and learn musical scales, recommending that the movie be used as a resource model for teachers in the rural areas of Africa who need orientations on how to go about employing musical theater as a pedagogical approach.