Theater preview
“Mary Poppins”
8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday. $28-$78. Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 1-855-285-8499, www.foxatltix.com.
Richard Sherman and his brother Robert learned a valuable piece of songwriting advice from their father: keep it simple, sing-able and sincere.
You could say they applied that thinking to all of their songs, some of which, perhaps, you and your family might have heard a few thousand times.
“A Spoonful of Sugar”? “The Bare Necessities”? “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”? Or how about “It’s a Small World”? Yes, that will now be stuck in your head all day. You’re welcome.
The Sherman brothers — whose dad, Al, was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter — are responsible for hundreds of musical memories written for the Disney stable, primarily in the 1960s and ’70s and as recently as 2000’s “The Tigger Movie.”
But among their treasures is the 1964 film “Mary Poppins.” The Shermans won a pair of Oscars for best original music score and best original song (“Chim-Chim Cher-ee”), while the film won three others, making it the most Oscar-decorated film in Disney history.
The live theatrical version arrived in — where else? — London in 2004 before touching down on Broadway in 2006. The show closed last month after six years, 2,619 performances and the distinction of being the 22nd-longest-running show in Broadway history.
But the story of the magical nanny and the Banks family will live on stage a bit longer. This latest national tour comes to the Fox Theatre Tuesday-Sunday before wrapping in June in Alaska.
The show combines elements of the film and the original books by P.L. Travers, with some musical tweaks by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe (the book was written by Julian Fellowes, creator of “Downton Abbey”).
Richard Sherman, for his part, is thrilled with the leap the story made from screen to stage.
“They’re two totally different beasts. In the play, you have an intermission, so you have to have a moment of tension to bring people back in the second half,” Sherman, 84, said recently from his home in California. “I love the way it seamlessly brings in two sets of writers, a brand-new scenario and yet it’s all based on the same storyline.”
Sherman recalled that when Walt Disney handed him and his brother — who passed away in 2012 at age 86 — Travers’ book, there was no linear story.
“We said, ‘My God, we have all of these wonderful characters, but there is no reason for Mary Poppins’ coming and going.’ Under Walt’s supervision, we devised the dysfunctional (Banks) family with a working father and a distracted mother. Mary Poppins came to teach the father that it doesn’t take much, but you have to give love and attention to your kids.”
That relatable theme is what has maintained “Mary Poppins’” international appeal, though, Sherman said, Travers “hated that we came up with a storyline and Walt Disney had to cajole her into letting him do the film.”
But along with the timeless tale of family bonding, a huge part of “Poppins’” perpetual success is the music. As we can all supercalifragistically attest, the Shermans’ songs do lodge themselves into our gray matter.
Sherman, though, laments that there is a crucial ingredient missing in most music today.
“Melody, melody, melody. Where did melody go?” he asks plaintively. “A few people still do it. Alan Menken writes good, strong melodies. But very few writers today write melodic lines. They write clever lyrics, but you don’t walk out of a Broadway show humming anything. Melody is God’s gift.”
Sherman will again apply his knack for melody by helping “fatten” the score to a stage version of “The Jungle Book,” coming to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre this summer.
And even with that, he’s holding steady to a simple approach.
“(My brother) and I worked together for 50 years, and we were always digging for that way of saying something in a new way,” Sherman said. “It’s a matter of expressing yourself and making yourself understood. That’s the fun of it.”
