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With Mary Poppins The Musical set to make its Australian debut in Melbourne this month, Amanda Dunn follows one of its stars, Matt Lee, as he kicks his knees up and steps in time.
You know that as soon as you see the words “Step in Time!” on the cover of M that you won’t be able to get the song out of your head, even if, like me, you’re a little hazy on some of the lyrics. That hasn’t stopped it taking hold of me while I’m driving, doing the grocery shopping or trying to go to sleep, possibly to the annoyance of the people around me. But it is one of the key dance sequences in Mary Poppins The Musical, which arrives at Her Majesty’s Theatre this month. The Australian production stars dancer/choreographer Matt Lee as Bert, whom many of you will recognise as the hat-wearing one on the So You Think You Can Dance judges’ desk. Lee plays the affable Bert, which requires him to sing, dance, act and turn on a cockney accent. He also needs to twirl a chimney sweep’s broom and go on a Jolly Holiday ... but I don’t want to give the whole thing away. So pack up your carpet bag and get down to Exhibition Street if you want to see what the east wind blows in.
Matt Lee is tap-dancing upside down. To be precise, he is in a harness inside an A-frame — the same sort of shape as a playground swing — that has a plank of wood cross-wise at the top. Upside down, his face turning scarlet with exertion, Lee is tapping along the plank, occasionally stopping to sing, after which the rest of the performers — chimney sweeps and the lovely Ms Poppins — burst into applause. That Lee is able to dance at all without his body weight providing the momentum that tapping’s strong beats require is testament to his strength and his skill.
It’s the second week of June and the performers are rehearsing in a church hall in South Melbourne that is a little too small for the purpose, its perimeters cluttered with Poppins props. By the time stage manager Matt Henderson carefully takes him down, Lee has streams of sweat running down his face. He will need to wear the harness underneath his costume for the whole scene, adding another 10 kilos to his body in what is already a physically demanding sequence. He gathers himself and rejoins the group to finish the number.
On stage, this will all have to happen quickly and carefully. The upside-down dancing comes in the middle of ‘Step in Time’, one of the big dance numbers in the musical version of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins books, which makes its Australian premiere at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s Theatre later this month.
Reality TV fans will know Lee, who plays Bert, as one of the judges from Channel Ten’s hugely successful So You Think You Can Dance, he being the youthful, hat-wearing choreographer/dancer at the end of the judges’ table. So often is his head dressed, in fact, that seeing him now in just his dark brown hair — the red trucker’s cap he was wearing had to come off to turn upside down — feels a little awkward, like walking in on him in the shower. Alongside him, carrying the famous black umbrella with the parrot’s head, is Verity Hunt-Ballard, a 28-year-old from Adelaide who was cast as the Australian version of the beloved nanny after a long search that even saw young hopefuls put audition reels of themselves on YouTube. Associate director James Powell says the difficulty finding Mary was not peculiar to the Australian production, the fifth since the musical premiered at the Bristol Hippodrome in 2004.
“When we were first casting in London we had to search long and hard,” Powell says. Nonetheless, the London creative team had hoped to cast the Australian production in two to three weeks, but had to leave at the end of it without their title character. “Yes, we were dejected,” Powell says, “but we didn’t think ‘it’s never going to happen’.” And so, “we came back for four weeks, and there was Verity”.
The musical version of the books, brought to life by British impresario Cameron Mackintosh, was a long time in the making. In a foreword to a new edition of the first book, Mackintosh writes of his 1993 meeting with the then 93-year-old Travers to discuss turning her stories into a musical, as she had always resisted turning the Disney film into a musical. He won her over, but only after insisting that her stories be combined with some of the key Sherman brothers songs from the film. Mackintosh writes that he used the books to guide him where to place the interval and where to add new songs: “Whenever I was stuck for an idea, I would think, ‘What would Pamela do or say’.”
Valerie Lawson, who has written a biography of Australian-born Travers called Mary Poppins She Wrote, says the key to her agreeing to Mackintosh’s proposal was him being true to the books. Having seen the musical in Bristol and in London, Lawson believes he has been. After all, Travers (who died in 1996) had not been a fan of the film, Lawson says, which she described as “all fantasy and no magic”.
Lee also emphasises that audiences should not expect to see the film transported to the stage, despite familiar tunes such as ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ and ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’. “It’s totally different,” he says. In fact, when he was cast in the production he deliberately steered away from watching the film again to avoid mimicking Dick Van Dyke’s Bert.
As a child, Lee had loved the Disney movie. A fan of horror films, he would watch Mary Poppins afterwards to calm himself down, so free is it from anything dark or sinister (Lawson points out that this is different from the books, which have a little more edge).
Associate choreographer Geoff Garratt, one of the team of British “creatives” brought out to oversee the Australian production, says performers will necessarily bring their own strengths and interpretations to the roles. One of Lee’s great strengths, he says, is that he is a “phenomenal tap-dancer”.
Back in the rehearsal room, Lee’s tapping talents are on display as he dances his way through a particularly complex sequence around a black chimney top. Next to him, Hunt-Ballard, who only started to learn tap at the Western Australian Academy for the Performing Arts when she was 19, has a much easier sequence which she performs in a long blue skirt with a very Mary air of amused imperiousness.
Around them is a diverse bunch of chimney sweeps — men and women — tapping and singing through a sequence while twirling long black brooms. This is one of the hardest things to do on stage: dance a high-energy routine while singing in a way that will sound pleasant to the audience.
When it is over, Garratt wants to mark out a new sequence. “OK, tap shoes off,” he says.
“Best thing I’ve heard all day,” one of the young performers comments to his cast mate.
Matt Lee was a highly energetic child, so much so that his parents sought ways for him to put that energy to good use, enrolling their five-year-old in little athletics and dance classes. Before long though, the inevitable Saturday morning timetable clash occurred, and Lee had to choose between them. It was easy, he says, to choose dance: “I had always loved it.”
It didn’t take long for him to decide that this was where he wanted his life to head. At about nine he was taken to see David Atkins’ stage show Dancin’ Man, where he remembers thinking, “Oh my god, I want to do that”.
His career got off to a precocious start, making his stage debut at seven. At 14, he toured Japan with David Atkins’ Hot Shoe Shuffle; at 16 he performed in Dein Perry’s Steel City and at 17 he appeared in Grease. By the time he completed his HSC, which his father insisted that he do, the young Sydneysider also had a full-time performing load in the musical Rent. He recalls that he would rehearse from 10am to 6pm, go home for dinner and study from 7pm until 10 or 11pm. His was an average score, he says, “but I’m just happy that I passed”.
Lee’s career continued to climb; he appeared in 2000 Australian dance film Bootmen before expanding his profile dramatically with the first season of SYTYCD in 2008, for which he also choreographed some of the numbers.
Mary Poppins is his first on-stage role since Miss Saigon in 2007, and he had to go back to the gym to get into shape.
“It’s a great adjustment,” he says. “Things start to expand when you’re just sitting behind a desk on your bum for so long.”
The rehearsal schedule is in itself enough to give Lee what he refers to as “show fitness”. The rehearsal period is fairly short — they only started at the beginning of June — but it is intense, with performers required every day except Sunday.
By the last week of June, ‘Step in Time’ is a polished number. This time the cast is in an even smaller rehearsal room, and the floors vibrate with the rhythmic banging of so many tap shoes moving in sync.
“Kick your knees up, step in time!” they sing as they dance, the kind of tune that you know you’re going to be singing to yourself for the rest of the day.
“Well done, guys, the best so far,” Garratt enthuses at the end of the routine.
“Matt, while it’s on my mind,” he says, taking Lee aside to say that he wants him to hold his broom in a particular way. “So it marries with what they’re doing,” he explains, gesturing to the other chimney sweeps.
It is a long dance sequence — about seven minutes — and Lee says later that the hardest thing is maintaining his stamina, especially when he will be wearing the harness, dancing underneath the hot stage lights.
While Garratt is pleased, he knows that the challenge will come when the performers move to the theatre, and the sequences will need to be recalibrated to suit the space.
“They’ll want to perform it and I’ll say, ‘We have to go back three paces’,” he says. Instead, he will have them “mark” the routine and they will use working light rather than the theatrical darkness of the rooftop scene.
For now, though, he is pleased: “They have all got the energy and the feel for the number.”
Across Her Majesty’s, the technical crew is already well ensconced, with three weeks to work on lighting, engineering and opening the roof of the venerable theatre so that Mary can “fly” through it — quite the entrance in anyone’s books — before the performers arrive.
Technical director Richard Martin oversees a crew of 60, including props and costumes, and says Mary Poppins is one of the most technically demanding shows he has worked on. Not only does he have Lee dancing upside down, but several of the characters “fly”, including the two children (there are five casts of children who play Jane and Michael Banks).
“With magic and sleight of hand, the timing has to be spot-on,” he says.
The crew has to be spot-on too, with specific jobs to perform in the tight backstage area as the performers move on and off. “The choreography backstage has to be as well-choreographed as it in on stage.”
In his experience, it’s always a bit weird for the performers when they first move to the theatre, and they suddenly have to work with the technical crew. “(They’ve) got all these strangers staring at them every day,” he says. “Unless you’re a seasoned professional, it can be a little unnerving.”
By the middle of last week, Garratt was pleased with the way the technical rehearsals were running. Soon they would be ready to run through the acts at performance speed, to see how well they manage the various costume and set changes.
For Lee, some of the more unnerving aspects of being Bert — such as flying — are becoming easier. “The more you do it, the more comfortable you get,” he says. With preview performances starting this week, all the cast and crew’s work is about to be put to the test.
As the east wind carries in the mystical nanny on opening night, Lee’s parents will fly in from Sydney.
“I’m nervous as hell,” Lee says. But “I’m really excited for people to see it, and I hope they embrace it.”
© Fairfax Media