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Mary Poppins is a typically English story that found an international audience as a Hollywood film.
But the producer of the stage version, Cameron Mackintosh, insists the new Australian production is a homecoming.
"It's England as perceived by someone who's Australian," the veteran producer said at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne yesterday, where Poppins will premiere next Thursday.
Mackintosh secured the rights to produce a stage show of P.L. Travers's most famous story only after delicate negotiations with the aged author in the two years before her death in 1996.
Australian-born Travers hated the 1964 Disney film, but Mackintosh knew that some of the movie's songs were needed if the stage show were to fly.
After all, what is Mary Poppins without A Spoonful of Sugar and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?
© The Australian.
