IF YOU think of Mary Poppins in terms of preposterously cute kids, a
sweetly singing Julie Andrews, cartoons of dancing penguins and lots of
spoonfuls of sugar helping worryingly little medicine to go down, you had
better think again. That’s not what Pamela Lyndon Travers, the tough-minded
author of the Poppins books, created. And although Disney is his
co-producer, it’s not the musical that Sir Cameron Mackintosh will be
bringing to the Prince Edward Theatre in London next month.
I chatted with Sir Cameron in his Robert Adam offices in Bloomsbury, and found
him in an exuberantly upbeat mood: Tigger to the big Pooh-like teddy that
stared at us from a sofa in the gorgeously furnished drawing-room in which
he works. And he has every reason to exude good cheer. The year has seen a
new version of Miss Saigon join several other Mackintosh revivals on
the road, the transfer of Les Misérables from the Palace to the
Queen’s and its staging at Windsor Castle for President Chirac, the
transformation of the Prince of Wales into a palatial Art Deco home for Mamma
Mia! — and, in Bristol in September, the unveiling of Poppins.
Like most people, Sir Cameron was enchanted by Disney’s Mary Poppins
when he saw it just after leaving school 40 years ago; but, unlike most
people, he went on to read P. L. Travers and felt, as he recalls: “Oh, there
are a lot more fascinating characters here than I ever realised.” Fifteen
years later he joined what was becoming a race for the rights to a stage
musical of the books, only to lose it to a Broadway impresario called Jules
Fisher. Though luminaries from Sondheim to Lerner were then mooted as
composers, dramatists from Storey to Stoppard as librettists, and Vanessa
Redgrave and Maggie Smith as potential Marys, Fisher’s project had fallen
through by the late 1980s.
That may have been because Travers not only objected to most of Fisher’s
suggestions but hoped to defy her age, which was 88 in 1988, by writing the
libretto herself. But Sir Cameron is a tenacious and persuasive man, and he
had better luck when he made the first of several visits to her Chelsea
house in 1993. By now he was the English-speaking world’s most successful
producer, with Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Les Mis
among his long runners, and she was ready to listen to his proposals: “She’d
been an actress, a dancer and a drama critic, she loved the theatre, she
wanted there to be a musical and I was her last chance of seeing her stories
become what she dreamt they could be,” says Sir Cameron.
“By then Pamela was very frail and birdlike. She would sit at the window of
her house and look out. She was observant and shrewd, and opinionated about
her work and the way it should be done. I went to interview her and found
she was interviewing me. She was absolutely driven to make sure her work had
an afterlife, so she wanted to know that I cared about her material and
would be her champion when she’d gone.”
And by the time she did go, dying less than four years short of her 100th
birthday, she had bequeathed Sir Cameron the stage rights and agreed to his
bottom-line condition, which was that the delightfully tuneful songs the
Sherman Brothers had written for the film be retained — “after all, they as
much as the characters have become part and parcel of why Mary Poppins
is so iconic,” explains Sir Cameron.
That was quite an achievement because Travers, an Australian-born poet who had
been fêted by Yeats, A. E. Russell and other Irish writers when she visited
Dublin, was intensely protective of her work. Though the great Walt made a
big fuss of her, even squiring her to the Hollywood opening of Mary
Poppins, she initally resisted his blandishments and (thinks Sir
Cameron) wouldn’t have signed a contract with Disney if her lawyer, Lord
Goodman, hadn’t begged her to accept an offer that made her rich for life.
And she made no secret of her ambiguous feelings about the finished film. Her
biographer, Valerie Lawson, reports her as objecting to “all that smiling,
just like Iago — and it was so untrue, all fantasy and no magic”.
She wasn’t happy to see the period changed from the 1930s to 1910 and, Sir
Cameron recalls, was indignant that Mrs Banks, the gentle, helpless lady who
employs Mary Poppins as her children’s nanny, had become a suffragette.
Though the new musical will still be set in the Edwardian era, Mrs Banks
will be what she originally was, as will the other characters. We’ll even
meet her husband’s old nanny, the ultra-strict “Holy Terror” who brought
fire and brimstone instead of love and understanding to her work and
explains Mr Banks’s immaturity. And where Disney drew on very few of
Travers’s short stories, Sir Cameron has aimed to weave many episodes into a
coherent whole.
Most unusually for an impresario, he initially did this himself. He read and
re-read the tales and penned a detailed synopsis that owed nothing to the
film script and, he says, has remained substantially unchanged. And while he
did so he found another explanation for his attraction to Travers’s work. He
identified with a person who gives her charges a lot of freedom of choice,
but, if they haven’t made enough of it, tells them so. She regards it as her
job to get the best out of good people and then to go on to something else:
“That’s her ethos and that’s my central ethos as a producer employing
wonderfully talented people: to be a productive nanny, not a nanny state.”
But he did then assemble an impressive team of collaborators: Julian Fellowes,
who had won an Oscar for Gosforth Park, to write the book; George
Stiles and Anthony Drewe, Olivier winners whose work Sir Cameron has
promoted for many years, to add new songs to the original ones; the
choreographer Matthew Bourne to evoke the adventures for which the film,
which had only one big dance number, used animation; and, as director, a
seemingly surprising choice. But Sir Cameron always wanted Richard Eyre to
join Bourne in staging Mary Poppins, since he’d hugely admired his
production of Guys and Dolls and knew that, like the Banks children,
he had a troubled background.
A sceptical Eyre took his time reading the stories Sir Cameron sent him, but
when he did, he was convinced, saying later that he hoped to help to create
a musical that had charm but was “tethered to a reality about an unhappy
family made happy by the intervention of this supernatural creature”.
Work on the project, with Disney’s theatre supremo, Tom Schumacher, often in
attendance and Travers’s trustees regularly consulted, began in earnest
early in 2003 and, Sir Cameron believes, has resulted in an imaginative
fusion of Travers and pizzazz. So expect the songs not to be merely
decorative, but to have dramatic reasons for existing. Expect Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,
for instance, to follow a conversation about language, not to accompany
caricature pearly kings and queens. Expect 60 or 70 per cent of the dialogue
to come from Travers’s books.
And expect a heroine rather nearer Travers’s Mary Poppins, a tart, crabby
figure who, when she says nothing cross all afternoon, provokes a worried
Banks child to beg her to be less nice. As Sir Cameron says, she has a
serious purpose, which is to educate the parents and give their children the
boundaries they crave: “She’s firm, she’s resolute, and therefore the kids
have an anchor in their lives, which is the thing their parents can’t give
them.”
Travers always refused to say precisely who Mary Poppins was or where she came
from, or to confirm Sir Cameron’s belief that Mr and Mrs Banks were based on
her mother, who died young, and her father, a hard-drinking bank manager who
lost his job and his money. Instead, she told him that the stories flowed
almost magically into her imagination. And since Travers was fascinated by
metaphysics as well as folklore, he sees the nanny as “a celestial being,
more than an angel, with elements of the Virgin Mary, who has come to earth
to help us be grown-up”.
Did the Bristol audiences object when they saw something more than a favourite
film transposed to the stage? Sir Cameron says he and his team didn’t
receive one letter complaining about that. If there was a beef amid the
enthusiasm it was that, early in the run, parents were taking along children
as young as three: “My belief always was that we’d have failed unless we did
this as a proper adult musical to which you could bring children of a
certain age and grannies of an even more certain age,” says Sir Cameron. “So
we’re recommending that seven and upwards is right, the same as for Les
Mis and Cats.”
That would have the sanction of Travers, who was irked by the suggestion that
she was writing for the young only. And for Sir Cameron her ghost remains a
powerful presence: “Even after her passing this redoubt-able old lady was
saying, ‘No, no, this is how I want it to be’, and so in cre- ating the show
all of us were driven by ‘how would Pamela deal with it?’ If she were alive
now I think she’ d like it very much — but I’m sure she’d have a hundred
pages of notes for us.”
- Previews of Mary Poppins begin at the Prince Edward Theatre on
December 6; box office 020-7447 5400
DID YOU KNOW. . .?
- Helen Lyndon Goff, aka Pamela Lyndon Travers, the author of the Mary
Poppins books, was Australian and became an actress at the age of
10
- The 1964 film Mary Poppins was nominated for 13 Academy Awards — a
record for movie musicals — and won five. Julie Andrews won an Oscar for
her screen debut
- There are eight books: Mary Poppins (1934), Mary Poppins Comes
Back (1935), Mary Poppins in the Park (1935), Mary
Poppins Opens the Door (1943), Mary Poppins From A-Z (1962),
Mary Poppins in the Kitchen (1975), Mary Poppins in Cherry
Tree Lane (1982) and Mary Poppins and the House Next Door (1988)
- Julie Andrews’s saccharine nanny lacks the chilly discipline and vanity of the
book character
- Disney made the mother into a dippy suffragette, dropped the father’s ultra
strict old nanny and shifted the action from the 1930s to 1910
- Development of Disney’s version took ten years, as Travers rejected mulitple
scripts.
HANNAH WESTLEY
