Production: The Sound of Music, produced by Joan Brickhill and Louis Burke — “an His Majesty’s Theatre production based on the original production by P.A.C.T.,” reviving a run Beryl had also appeared in the first time round (no programme survives from that original production)
Venue: His Majesty’s Theatre, Johannesburg — first performance 10 June 1976, followed by a national tour to the 3 Arts Theatre, Cape Town, and the Alhambra Theatre, Durban
Director/Choreographer: Joan Brickhill and Louis Burke
Musical Director: Michael Hankinson
Décor & Costumes: Johan Engels
Cast: Diane Todd (Maria), Louis Burke (Captain von Trapp), Jarmila Tellinger (the Mother Abbess, for which she won a Gallo award), Joyce Dalton (Sister Sophia), Doreen McElroy (Sister Berthe), Beryl Ellis (Sister Margaretta, Mistress of Postulants)

The Ellis Contribution: Beryl Ellis played Sister Margaretta — a different role from the Sister Sophia she’d played in Brian Brooke’s separate 1963 production of the same musical, thirteen years apart and for two different companies. In this production she’s pictured with her fellow nuns, Joyce Dalton and Doreen McElroy, in the souvenir programme’s cast portraits.

Significance: The production and its tour were large-scale by any measure — Joan Brickhill’s own programme note puts the combined company for this and the concurrent Follies Fantastique at over 200 people.

This 1976 run is distinct from the 1963 Brian Brooke production, in which Beryl Ellis had also appeared — as Sister Sophia rather than Sister Margaretta. No programme survives from the original Brickhill-Burke/PACT production of which this was billed as a “return season.”