For most of 2003 and 2004, Stiles and Drewe were working on Mary Poppins...
...which represents a West End premiere of a decidedly heady sort.
Everyone, of course, knows such classic Richard and Robert Sherman songs from the film as Feed the Birds, Supercalifragalistic… and the Oscar-winning Chim Chim Cheree. Stiles and Drewe’s job has been to write new songs and provide additional music and lyrics for existing ones. Drewe says proudly but without a trace of arrogance:
“I think probably more than 50% of the lyrics are mine, and there’s not a single bar that George hasn’t rearranged or harmonised in a somewhat different way; it’s ended up being a much bigger job than we thought – much more work than we really thought it was going to be.”
Still, who wouldn’t relish the chance to tweak for the stage Let’s Go Fly a Kite or Step in Time, while also writing seven new songs, which have to slot in stylistically with the originals? One of the new numbers, Practically Perfect, in fact dates back nine years, when Mackintosh first floated to the team the idea of having Mary Poppins sing on stage.
“You hear people having a row about whether Practically Perfect was in the film or not,
They don’t quite know.”
Of another one, Temper Temper, Stiles explains:
“We are very deliberately pushing the envelope, taking it to a slightly darker place. Children think they know everything, but these Banks children are a much nastier pair: they have more problems than they ever had in the film.”
How did you write the new music in the show?
After a breezy flight from Bristol the nanny with the umbrella and the carpet bag has finally touched down in London, trailing glowing notices in her wake. Yes, unless you’ve been trekking in Outer Mongolia you’ll know that Mary Poppins is now a stage musical. And along with her Spoon Full of Sugar and her Supercalifragilisticexpialidocic manner, she has also spirited us a handful of brand new songs.
With a little help, it has to be said, from George Stiles and Anthony Drewe..
So, Mary Poppins, Cameron Mackingtosh comes to you with this extraordinary offer of this iconic film musical, the whole world knows the songs, what was your first reaction?
Aarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!!!
Yes Please!!
The funny thing was that we’d heard rumours for a long, long time that there was a plan to bring Mary Poppins to the stage and we would never have dreamed that they wanted new songs for it.
So when we were first approached, and the idea was muted that we might write some extra songs we though, well how are we going to blend with the Sherman brothers, and where do they want new songs to fit within the story? And indeed are they just going to put the film on stage?
But after the very first meetings with both Cameron Mackingtosh and Tom Schumaker, who is the president of Disney Theatre, and with Julian Fellows, who has written the book, we all got together and we devised a scheme which has a slightly different storyline.
Which is drawing on both Pamela Travers’s books, as well as the Disney movie and that has opened up some opportunities for some new songs to be fitted in.
How daunting was it to have the style of another composer in your head and know that you had to both be yourselves and take on board that style?
it’s true, it is daunting.
The Sherman brothers are the songs I grew up as a kid singing.
Richard Eyre, our director, describes their songs as being our musical DNA, our collective DNA.
And he is right, they are shared experienced things, like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious are known by almost everybody.
I suppose Cameron wanted to give the whole thing a new lease of life, a new zest so two young composers…
Bless you for that!!
Well it sort of needed to be slightly reinvented because it’s going to be in the theatre, so it needed a two act structure, apart from anything else.
So where did you start, which was the song…
Well believe it or not ten years ago, we heard this rumour that there would be a musical, this was before the alliance had properly been forged between Cameron and Disney.
But it was when it was clear that the stage rights were a separate entity to the film rights. By a glitch of nature it took Disney eighteen years to get the contract at all to make the movie and it turned out that he didn’t have the stage rights, Pamela Travers eventually granted them to Cameron Mackintosh.
Around the time this all happened, before she died, we heard that there was a possibility so we thought the thing to do is to get in there ,and pitch a song to prove that we can meld with the score, and we wrote a song, having watched the move again, which seemed so obvious.
She holds the tape measure to the two children and says "thoughtless", "noisy", and the little boy says
“I don’t belive you, you’re making it up” and there on the tape measure it says so.
They they say "What about yoru measurement Mary Poppins?", and she holds up the tape measure and it says “Mary Poppins, Practically Perfect in every way. “
Well we couldn’t believe that they hadn’t written a song called that. So in our arrogance at that point knowing nothing about how it would be adapted we said well we’ll move Spoonfull of Sugar and make it later in the act as everyone knows it and it will be good to make them wait. We’ll write a new song here that introduces a little bit more abouto Mary’s character.
So we plunged into a couple of the books and dared to write the following ditty
I have to compliment you on your Mary, George – Practically perfect in ever way!
Well I’ve been singing the role of Mary now for about a year and three quarters ever since we started writing it and the way its worked is, that about every five or six weeks the show takes a big step forwards and we’ve gathered at Cameron’s house in Somerset and we’ve become known as the Stavardale Players and the troop is a rather extraordinary one.
At one stage Julian Fellows performec his Mary Poppins! Which was a bit alarming!
Cameron described it as Margaret Thatcher playing Mary Poppins and banned him from every doing the role again!
He is now relegated to Mrs Brill the housekeeper!
So these were the meeting every week and all of you decided on where do we need a song? I gather you also adapted the songs that the Sherman brothers wrote.
Yes, in a way that was the more daunting because we felt we were treading on sacred ground to a certain extent.
In order to fit songs like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious into the new storyline, we had to reinvent them and tailor them to fit in to the new book to make sure that they weren’t just gratuitously stuck in.
With Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious there is about 60% - 70% new lyric
Wow, is it true that you overheard a little kid going into the theatre singing the lyrics, and you though “he’s in for a rude awakening!
On more than one occasion I was standing outside the Bristol Hippodrome hearing children arrive singing the songs and thinking
“I’m going to ruin all of your evening!”
A little bit that might show how we set about this, you’ll remember the Jolly Holiday sequence when they blended live action with animation – famously because it could be done, and it was brand new.
It was the first time it had been done, and because it was new they went off on this fifteen minute fantasy in the number with a fox hunt, and the Merry go round horses come off the merry-go-round, all based vaguely from Travers's books, but we felt that to try and jump through chalk painting and to try and have dancing penguins in furry suits, was not quite what any of us wanted to do.
So we go back to the concept, we found another little incident in the book based on a character called Nelius who’s the son of Poseidon and is a statue in the park and he becomes a friend of children. And we thought – what a great idea. Statuary coming to life, and it gave us all sorts of ideas.
Especially as statuary rhymes with Mary it was very useful from that point of view!
The melody for Jolly holiday is quite long, and what we relised is that we also had a journey for these children.
We’ve made the children a lot naughtier.
Julian felt particularly that the characters had very little real problems, they were cartoon problems, we wanted to anchor it in reality. So these children are the 1910 equivalence of drop-outs.
They are not going to school etc. So they are unconvinced at a walk in the park with Mary so we though that at the end of their melody, we would give them their answer
So we end the chorus...
At which point the statue of Nelius cracks into life behind them
Yeah, which builds and builds as this whole even in the park takes place.
In a way, what we’ve done, is that we go outside of the house into a fantasy land whenever Mary is exerting her magic. In the film this was achieved with animation in a way the film was a stage musical that had never been put on stage.
We have used the essence of the magical elements in a theatrical way and we go to a fantasy world when that takes place.
You talked there about hardening the children’s attitudes. The original books were a little darker, familes that kind of neglet and leave their children to the nannies and don’t have much contact with them. Have any of those elements come back into the show?
There were a number of much darker themes running throught the series of books. There are actually six books in the set. She wrote the first two book around the 1930s and they are very much the beginning of her story and the end of her story.
Over the next fifty years she wrote another four books literally until about 1988 which got slotted in between those first two books.
They are further adventures with Mary and the kids and there are lots of darker themes that run through it and one of them involves a pot, a Dalton bowl in the nursery cracking open and the characters who were on the bowl coming to life.
In the theatre we couldn’t really have a bowl cracking open, and characters believably coming to life, so we have had the children behaving very badly, banished to the nursery, and the toys who they have mistreated all evening, suddenly coming to life and putting the children on trial. Then Mary turns up, as this is another one of her games that she has been playing with the children.
Also there is quite a fun story attached to this because we were summoned weekly to meet with Cameron to make sure we had done our work.
He realized that if he did not crack the whip this musical would probably never get written! We were summoned one Friday and we had not fulfilled our weekly task! We had got to this point in the show, where we had all agreed that it would be fun to have this sequence and we had begun to work out how it would happen.
We knew that this where we would push the musical envelope aswell and go a little bit further.
We wanted something quite savage and earthy. We had not actually come up with anything, not a jot, not a single idea. We were driving down to Cameron’s, which is a two hour drive, and we were wondering what we were going to do.
So the moment we arrived, I skived straight off into the big drawing room where there is a big grand piano and I started thumping away on this gloriously resonant instrument while the door was firmly shut, and Anthony was with Cameron making coffee…..
... and suddenly we heard this rather tympanic accompaniment coming out from the other room, and Cameron said
‘OOoh what’s that’
and I said “well it’s the new song!” knowing full well it was the first time I had heard it
I had no idea about this, as they came back into the room, I said “what do you think of this?” and I played this rhythm.
I knew it was quite a strong rhythmic drive.
Anthony as quick as lighting says...
(this happens so rarely I have to say!)
Sometimes the music tells me what the words should be that sits on the note, and it sounded like “Temper, Temper”.
We really enjoyed this.
It becomes this massive choral sequence with the entire cast of these injured toys with legs and arms hanging off.
The walls of the nursery stretch open, and the wall paper slashes as it opens up, it’s a very nightmarish sequence.
People said will the children be too scared?
Watching at the Bristol Hippodrome, it was the very moment that every child in the theatre came to the edge of their seat.
Children adore being slightly afraid!
I suppose the big dream for you both must be that eventually people will go round humming your tunes and your songs, in the same way they hum the Sherman brothers songs.
its been fascinating overhearing conversations in the bar at the interval with people swearing that they have been singing Practically Perfect since they were six, and it comes in the film at the following point!
What was the Sherman Brothers Reaction to all of this?
Well that was terrifying!
I think it was part of Cameron Mackintosh and Pamela Travers’s agreement that any amendments to the score would be made by a British team because she wanted it to feel more British I guess.
It was Cameron in his early meetings with her, before she died, who managed to persuade her that it had to have the Sherman brother’s songs in it because they are so much an iconic part of the whole Mary Poppin’s event. So we were separate from the Sherman brothers, although we were desperate to meet them, because we are such fans of their work.
When we had our first draft, Dick Sherman and his wife, Elizabeth, came over from Los Angeles and we played them everything. They were so encouraging, and generous of spirit in allowing us to unpick their songs, then put them back together again. I think that they were moved that we had fought to keep as much of their original stuff in it as possible. I think they were worried that these two British upstarts were going to do a whole different take on it. In fact wherever a new song has been needed we have often gone back to one of their tunes and used it, just so it has a coherence across the whole evening.
Now every show has to have an eleven o’clock number, and I guess you wanted it to be yours!
well actually, we didn’t!
As Anthony said, the songs are the reason we are doing this show. Dick and Bob’s songs are the single reason why Mary Poppins became the enormous success that it did. They are so brilliant. Their simplicity, their invention of words like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, they are just so timeless.
Anything Can Happen, actually moved to the 11 o’clock slot long after we wrote it. And indeed we wrote it with one of the most awe inspiring briefs any producer has ever given a writer!
Cameron said “Now dear, this one is going to be one that you sing at your funeral!”
well you probably don’t sing it at your funeral!
Well you don’t sing it!
Knowing me they will still be trying to nail down the box.. "One more number!!"
So that didn’t give us any pressure at all!
He also said it needs to be something Aretha Franklin could cover…
It was a tricky brief! It was going to be sung by a Mrs Corrie, who is briefly glimpsed a the beginning of the movie but is a wonderful story in the book, which we have melded into the show.
We sort of realized that Anything Can Happen was Mary’s anthem. Because what she is trying to teach the children is that anything is possible if you can only get out of your own way, as Julian puts it. Which is a lovely thought!
The lyrical version of that is, Anything Can Happen If You Let It. We wanted to try and make every lyric as Maryish as possible, and as full of attitude as possible.
