I was around the world in Pleiku, Viet-nam completing my tour
of duty that started the day President Kennedy was shot on November
22nd, 1963. It would end 1 year, 10 days, 12 hours, and 15 minutes
later, the week before Christmas, 1964. It would take over 10 years
to learn about many of the events that I missed.
Brothers Robert M Sherman and Richard M Sherman won two
Oscars for their music and lyrics for the 1964 Disney film
Mary Poppins starring Julie Andrews as the flying no
nonsense nanny and Dick Van Dyke as cockney chimney sweep
Bert.
The music is instantly recognizable. Who can't hum 'Chim Chim
Cher-ee', 'A Spoonful Of Sugar', 'Let's Go Fly A Kite' and
'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'? The Sherman brothers were
one of the most popular songwriting teams of all time. Their music
became enduring Poppins classics ('Feed the Birds' was Wait
Disney's own favourite song). George Stiles and Anthony Drewe
re-arranged and augmented a London stage play version over 40 years
later. The task was given to a couple of young Olivier Award-winning Brits.
Their Assignment?
The assignment was to compose new songs and additional
lyrics for the eagerly-awaited Disney Cameron Mackintosh
produced stage version. George Stiles and Anthony
Drewe played all of the new music they had written for the show at that time for
the Sherman brothers. No-one in the room at the time had
any doubt that the Shermans were overjoyed at what they heard.
"It really was one of the best days ever. Richard sat on the sofa
in Cameron's office and cried tears of joy that all of their original stuff was
intact. But he was also relieved that the spirit of the original score was
caught and complemented in the new songs," according to Stiles.
"It's hard to imagine being given a project that is
more brilliant or rewarding than Mary Poppins,"
continued Drewe, the lyricist in the-partnership. "It's
also true to say that it was extremely terrifying at first.
We were given carte blanche by Cameron to pretty much do
what we wanted with the existing Sherman brothers' songs as
well as to write or develop the new ones it was felt were
needed for the story on stage which is not the story of the
film and owes a lot to the much darker original books by PL
Travers. I mean, how far do you go and mess around with
classic songs that we have both known since we were six
years old? That was the terrifying side of the
thrill."
The new version was a success by everyone's standards.
Stiles usually composes on a grand piano in a back-room
overlooking the garden, while Drewe jots down lyrics in his
small den at the front (usually, he confides, lying
face-down on his tummy on huge floor-cushions), the writing
partners seem to be tickled pink that no-one heard the join
between their six brand-new numbers and the Shermans' songs
when the show previewed in Bristol. Stiles and Drewe
showstoppers like 'Brimstone and Treacle' and 'Anything Can
Happen' immediately created a buzz.
"We'd been working on the songs for over a year and a
half by the time we got to Bristol, so there wasn't a bar of
the show we hadn't arranged - and there are over three
thousand of them. You'd hear people coming out saying that
'Temper Temper' was definitely in the film, and yet it's one
of ours," recalls Stiles. And everyone came out humming
'Supercalifragilistic...' even though its 80 per cent new
lyrics"
"In the film there aren't many 'ocious' rhymes so I
had to make them up - the Shermans used 'atrocious' and
'precocious' but not 'ferocious', so I put that in, then
made up my own like 'Check your breath before you speak in
case it's halitoicious'.
"My favourite," Stiles interjects is: 'Add
some further flourishes, it's so rococococious'!
"
You can see why...
Cameron Mackintosh and his Disney production
partners led by the equally impassioned Thomas Schumacher,
commissioned these two Poppins addicts to re score the show:
you expect a flying nanny to call by any second, or see
sooty-faced chimneysweeps dancing on their roof tiles. As
Mary herself might say, they are "practically perfect" for
the job. Indeed, the first completely new song they wrote
was entitled 'Practically Perfect'. That was ten years ago
when a Mary Poppins stage musical was still a long-held
dream for Cameron Mackintosh, and the Stiles and Drewe
writing partnership had hit the big time with Honk!, their
delightful musicalisation of Hans Christian Andersen's The
Ugly Duckling.
After they wrote 'Practically Perfect', however, there
was eight years of silence before they got the phone call in
January 2003 to join the creative team, which includes
director Richard Eyre, choreographer Matthew Bourne and book
writer Julian Fellowes. "Then it was all systems go. Cameron
made us write a song a week for the first few weeks."
But it wasn't all spoonfuls of sugar. On one occasion
they'd been summoned to the Mackintosh residence in Somerset
and arrived knowing full well that they hadn't got a new
theme to play him.
"We felt like kids who hadn't done their
homework," blushes Drewe.
"I was in the kitchen
making coffee with Cameron and George was in the lounge
tinkling on the piano and Cameron heard him and said 'Oh I
like the sound of that. What is it?' I said I thought it was
the new sequence when the children misbehave - which it was.
But George hadn't actually written anything. He just busked
- and rhythmically it sounded a bit angry, like "temper,
temper". So almost on the spot we came up with an idea for a
song. Of course, Cameron loved it."
The original film was a phenomenal success in 1964.
It played to around 200 million people when it was first
released. The stage show has more than lived up to all the
expectation and could well follow suit and become the nanny
of all family musicals. And although when they met at
university, Stiles and Drew may not have set out to become
the Rodgers and Hammerstein of family friendly musical
comedies, that's just what seems to have happened. Apart
from Honk! and Peter Pan, they also co-wrote the hugely
successful Kipling-influenced Just So and there are a number
of family-orientated offers in the pipeline for next year
and beyond.
"We wrote Honk! in a heartbeat in 1997 and since then
there have been over a thousand productions around the
world. I've seen it done in Iceland, Israel, Denmark - I've
even directed it myself in Japan," says Drewe. "As the show
has gone out across the world we have waited and waited and
now musical comedy is completely coming back," Stiles goes
on. "Our first show together, Tutankhamun, was the only
'sung through' musical and 1 think we felt that you have to
make too many compromises: you end up with characters
singing dialogue like, 'I've got to make a phone call'.
Unless you are Puccini and can make that sound interesting
why bother. 1 think we'd much rather be writing music to 'I
love you' than 'Can I have two sugars in my tea."
You
can buy the CD of this version. It is available in the stores
and on-line. I now close another missing chapter of my life
with this HTML page and hope all of you enjoy the pages of music
and accompanying pictures.
The assignment was to compose new songs and additional
lyrics for the eagerly-awaited Disney Cameron Mackintosh
produced stage version. George Stiles and Anthony
Drewe played all of the new music they had written for the show at that time for
the Sherman brothers. No-one in the room at the time had
any doubt that the Shermans were overjoyed at what they heard. 
"I was in the kitchen
making coffee with Cameron and George was in the lounge
tinkling on the piano and Cameron heard him and said 'Oh I
like the sound of that. What is it?' I said I thought it was
the new sequence when the children misbehave - which it was.
But George hadn't actually written anything. He just busked
- and rhythmically it sounded a bit angry, like "temper,
temper". So almost on the spot we came up with an idea for a
song. Of course, Cameron loved it."