It’s traditional, in the theatre, to think of the great partnerships being on
stage rather than off: Gielgud and Richardson, Finney and Courtenay, Jessica
Tandy and Hume Cronyn. But a recent Saturday found me down in Somerset, in
what was once a 13th-century priory, to discuss the biggest
behind-the-scenes theatrical pairing of our time: the first collaboration
between Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the British musicals impresario, and Thomas
Schumacher, the American head of Disney Theatrical Productions.
What makes this important, you might ask. Because one can, without any
exaggeration, claim that these two men, between them, bestride the
theatrical world. Even Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, a glamorous West End
pairing though the Dames were last year, don’t represent such a potent
combining of forces, as theatregoers will discover when the first fruit of
the Mackintosh-Disney collaboration ripens at the end of next year: the
stage-musical premiere of Mary Poppins.
The story of Poppins’s belated stage birth is the one I have come to Somerset
to hear. And so I find myself in the spacious kitchen of Stavordale, the
seven-bedroom country estate (situated on 34 acres when Mackintosh bought it
just over a decade ago; the property now encompasses upwards of 1,500 acres)
that is the preferred one of the producer’s multiple homes. With a personal
fortune estimated by his own office to be as much as £240m, much of it in
land, Mackintosh, 57 last Friday, need never start a new project again. He
could live off the continuing incarnations of the so-called Big Four — Cats,
Les Mis, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon — as they continue to
blaze trails around the globe. Last year, his company had a £30m turnover.
But never discount the power of individual passion in the theatre — the kind
that Mackintosh has, for a quarter of a century, harboured for Mary Poppins.
And in Schumacher — the 45-year-old American who joined Disney in 1987, only
to move over time from animation in order to devote himself wholly to the
conglomerate’s now crucial theatrical portfolio — Mackintosh may just have
met his theatrical soul mate. Like Mackintosh before him, Schumacher is
someone used to rolling out musicals around the world: Beauty and the Beast,
Aida and The Lion King, the last of which opens its 10th production in
Sydney tonight. And, as an employee of a company whose total revenue for the
2002 fiscal year was £18 billion, Schumacher is not exactly unaccustomed to
thinking big or dealing with charismatic people who operate on a large
scale. The two producers, says Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for his
Gosford Park screenplay and is writing the book for Mary Poppins, represent
“rather an extra- ordinary alliance; there’s showbiz history here, and, as
the Americans say, they’re on the same page”.
That’s where a shared desire to see a theatre adaptation of Mary Poppins comes
in, and it is what has brought Mackintosh and Schumacher together. Still,
why colla-borate? Simple: Mackintosh has long held the stage rights to the
author Pamela Travers’s Poppins books — three main texts and several more
collections written at her publisher’s behest. Disney, of course, owns the
hugely popular 1964 film, an epoch-making mixture of live action and
animation that brought Julie Andrews an Oscar as the magical nanny (and
preserved for ever her co-star Dick Van Dyke’s distinctly dodgy cockney
accent). If Mary Poppins were ever, therefore, to come to the stage, it
would have to arrive as some sort of theatrical union.
Says Mackintosh: “Travers created the books, and Disney created the film that
turned everyone on to the books, and it is one of the most wonderful films
ever made. In my mind, there is no question that this is part of the reason
Mary Poppins is known by people in a way that I am not. I hope I will be
seen to have been the third person” — after Travers and Disney — “who has
brought something to it.”
Mackintosh first applied for the theatrical rights in 1978: “Like basically
every producer in the world, I had had the brilliant idea of putting Mary
Poppins on the stage.” But it wasn’t until 1993, when David Pugh, the London
producer of Art, arranged an introduction to Travers, that things started
hotting up, and various names even began to be floated in gossip columns:
Stephen Daldry as director, Emma Thompson or Fiona Shaw as Mary Poppins.
(“I’ve never heard Fiona Shaw’s soprano,” deadpans Mackintosh.) The year is
significant, as it was that same autumn that Disney launched its theatrical
division with Beauty and the Beast, from which it was clear many more stage
properties would flow.
Poppins, unsurprisingly, was in the mix relatively early. Says Schumacher: “I
have a memo that Michael Eisner (the head of Disney) wrote in 1995, saying:
‘Let’s try to get this Mary Poppins thing tied up in the next six months.’”
What followed, instead, was a complex series of negotiations. It wasn’t
until the end of 2001 that Schumacher took the initiative and arranged a
meeting with Mackintosh. “I said to Cameron, ‘Look, there’s all this deal
stuff that is obviously never going to work. But what nobody’s talked about
is what the show could be.’”
Ah, the deal, that most salient of all words, whether you’re talking Tony
Blair and Gordon Brown or some of the partnerships entered, in different
ways, by Disney’s film-animation division — with Steven Spielberg and Robert
Zemeckis, for example, on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Tim Burton on The
Nightmare Before Christmas. But the Mary Poppins deal is different from the
Hollywood norm. “Much of Hollywood is about the deal,” says Schumacher,
“because so little of it is about the making, and so there are people who
are producers because they can make a deal, and then they drop by the set
twice — and the deal is not the making of something. By contrast, this Mary
Poppins is about making something, about coming back to the table again and
again.”
For Mackintosh, Schumacher’s wholesale commitment to Disney’s theatre division
was the impetus the British impresario required. “Everywhere else in the
world, you have to deal with a group of producers. Look at (the Broadway
musical) The Producers — there are about a dozen of them.” With Schumacher,
Mackintosh finds “it is like dealing with another me: the artistic process
couldn’t be simpler”. And though the men had met only once prior to Poppins
— “Over a jolly lunch,” recalls Schumacher, in St Tropez in August 1997 — it
is clear that they speak the same language. Says the designer Bob Crowley,
who will work on Poppins, having won a Tony for the Mackintosh-backed
National Theatre’s Carousel and another one for the Disney-backed Aida on
Broadway: “Once Tom and Cameron met up, as opposed to the idea of the
Cameron-Mackintosh organisation and the corporation of Disney, and it became
personalised as it has, I knew it would be a great marriage.” For that,
Crowley credits Schumacher, for breaking from what might be seen as the
Disney mould: “I knew that if this was going to work, it would work because
of Tom. He’s a man of the theatre, not just a man in a suit from Burbank.”
That it seems to be working so far can be judged from the buzz that has built
around Poppins ever since a rehearsed reading of the show on September 15,
upstairs at the Old Vic in front of an audience of about 50, Eisner
included. At last, the production’s co-director and choreographer, Matthew
Bourne, and its director, Richard Eyre — the latter making his own bid for
the kind of international musical franchise over which his National Theatre
successor, Trevor Nunn, has long presided — could hear Fellowes’s
Travers-steeped book wedded to the extant Sherman brothers songs (one of
which, Chim Chim Cher-ee, won an Oscar) as well as half-a-dozen new ones
from the composer-lyricist team of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, whose
National Theatre entry, Honk! The Ugly Duckling, won the 2000 Olivier Award
for best musical over, wait for it, The Lion King. (“I guess the judges
couldn’t get tickets to Lion King,” quipped Stiles and Drewe at
the time.) At the reading, Joanna Riding was Poppins, with Drewe himself
taking on the Dick Van Dyke role. Julia McKenzie, in a rare return to
singing, played Miss Andrew, a former governess of the Banks family who
features prominently in the books and not at all in the film, while Alex
Jennings (winner of an Olivier for Mackintosh’s My Fair Lady in the West
End) and Claire Moore played Mr and Mrs Banks. The West End production has
yet to be cast.
Rehearsals start next July, followed by an out-of-town tryout — Mackintosh’s
first — leading to a December 15 London first night at the Prince Edward,
one of Mackintosh’s seven West End theatres. “We have to give the audience a
show that delivers what you hope will happen when you come to see Mary
Poppins,” says Schumacher, “not just ride on the title.” But will the
Disney-Mackintosh names by themselves sell tickets? “Let’s put it this way,”
smiles Mackintosh, “I don’t think we’ll put anybody off.”
Mary Poppins opens on December 15, 2004, at the Prince Edward, W1
Matt Wolf is the London theatre critic for Variety
