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It took more than a spoonful of sugar for the Disney musical to be reborn.
Cameron Mackintosh stepped out of his car at the lolly pink door in London's Chelsea. Inside her Regency terrace home at 29 Shawfield Street, Pamela Travers had something valuable to sell: the stage rights to her creation, Mary Poppins. Mackintosh squeezed past Mervyn, the wooden rocking horse in the front hall, to find Travers, then 94, perched in a chair by the living room windows. The Australian-born Travers was as English as Poppins and spoke in a voice as British as the Queen's. She stared at the producer as he outlined his case.
Travers told him how bitterly she felt about Walt Disney's 1964 adaptation of Mary Poppins.Yes, it was colourful enough, but Disney had failed to capture the essence of her books. The Hollywood movie was "all fantasy and no magic". Mackintosh, in turn, told her how much he loved her series of Poppins books and their witty characters, so English, so not American in manner. He sensed that "she obviously liked the film a lot more than she let on".
© The Australian.
