Everyone involved in the making of Mary Poppins Returns felt the pressure to do justice to the original 1964 film.
Rob Marshall worked on it for three straight years. Animators came out of retirement to do hand-drawn animation in the style of the first. Sets were built. Cast members moved their family to London for a year. But perhaps no one short of Emily Blunt and Marshall were as heavy with responsibility as composer Marc Shaiman and his co-lyricist Scott Wittman. They had the Oscar-winning songwriting duo Robert and Richard Sherman to live up to, after all.
LABORIOUS EFFORT
Photo: AP
Shaiman, who composed the score and nine original songs for the new film, credits the Shermans for getting him interested in music to begin with. He remembers being four-years-old and listening to the Mary Poppins album and thinking, “This is what I want to do with my life.”
“He was a precocious 4-year-old,’’ added Wittman, who has known Shaiman for over four decades. The two are Broadway mainstays and have worked together on the Hairspray and Catch Me if You Can musicals.
As a framework, Marshall said he “didn’t want to reimagine the music and have it be a contemporary version of Mary Poppins, or Mary Poppins singing Let It Go or something.’’ He wanted it in the style of the Sherman brothers and classic movie musicals, which became an opportunity for Shaiman and Wittman.
“We realized this was our chance to thank them via music and lyrics,” Shaiman said. “he whole movie is to say thank you, you’ve taught us all of these things, let us show you what you’ve given us by doing our take on the story.’’
The process of writing the score and the songs was long and laborious, and a true team effort: Four months of twice-a-week sessions with Marshall and screenwriters David Magee and John DeLuca to hammer out the story, the script and the direction of the songs together, and decide which moments in the P.L. Travers books to musicalize.
“Very often we would say to David, can you write a monologue of what you think this should be?” Wittman said. “And then we’d say OK thanks we’re taking that and we’re going to write a lyric to it.”
RHYMING IN BRITISH ENGLISH
They also were able to write specifically for Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda, playing to their strengths. The two men said Blunt has the rare gift of “perfect pitch.”
“I loved working with those two guys, they’re a rip,” Blunt said. “They’re just hilarious to be around.”
Wittman likes to quote Lin-Manuel Miranda’s summation of the music.
“He said this Mary Poppins rhymes with the first movie,” Wittman said. “We felt it was important that they both live in the same world. That influenced the writing.”
Wittman, the co-lyricist, had books upon books about London in the 30s, dictionaries of cockney rhyming slang and encyclopedias of odd Victorian words piled up in his studio that he studied and would go back to in crafting the new lyrics.
He laughed that despite his extensive research, there were a few times he and Shaiman, both Americans, got caught with a rhyme that didn’t quite work with an English accent. One was pointed out by Miranda’s dialect coach, the other by the young actors portraying the Banks children. The lyrics in question that the kids caught, “hand” and “command,” were to be sung by Meryl Streep, who, because of the “bizarre, bouillabaisse” of an accent she was affecting was able to make it work.
DREAM PROJECT
The whole experience has been something of a dream for Shaiman and Wittman. They got the rare privilege of getting to record the actors singing along with a 100-piece orchestra before filming began. They’ve also gotten to spend time with Richard Sherman (Robert Sherman died in 2012), and hear legends like Dick Van Dyke and Angela Lansbury sing their songs.
“As someone who usually can’t shut up, I have yet to find the words to describe what it is to hear them,” Shaiman said.
Sherman has told them that he’s happy with what they’ve done. As is their director.
“Marc and Scott have written this very sophisticated, hummable, fun (piece),” Marshall said. “The lyrics are so clever and so smart. You feel like you’ve heard them and know them but they’re new.”
Wittman said they’re “just proud of the movie the way it came out. It could have gone wrong in so many ways.”
“My agent said that!” Sherman added. “He said there are so many ways this could have gone so terribly wrong. And it’s such a miracle that none of those things happened.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located