How Director Eyre Helped Bring Poppins to Life
By Sheryl Flatow
Eyre's emotional detachment from the movie served the creative team well in helping focus and shape the material. "I would be unintentionally heretical by saying, 'Why do we need "Feed the Birds"? Justify the song to me,'" he says. "It's quite good to have somebody on a project who keeps saying, stubbornly, 'I don't understand this. You all say this is very important. Why is this very important?' And they'd say, 'It's a keystone of the movie.' And I'd say, 'Okay, fine. But that still doesn't make it important for our purposes.' Going through that sort of rigorous process of examining the premise that we were working on was, I'm sure, very irritating. But more and more I hammered away at the idea that this has to be a story about family. This is what the audience are going to relate to. Everything has to come from that, and has to spin off from that. Of course we need 'Feed the Birds.' Of course we need 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.' But they've got to emerge organically out of the action. Our show doesn't break faith with the movie. Anybody that comes to our show with this adored memory of the movie will not feel that the movie has been traduced. I think they get the spirit of the movie, plus something else that is original."
With each subsequent production, the show has continued to evolve. "There aren't massive differences, but cumulatively there are quite substantial differences from when we started in London," says Eyre. "I think it's true of all musicals: if they have a life, they continue to develop. The staging for the tour had to be changed because the set had to be made portable. There's a permanent structure of a house onstage on Broadway. The house on the tour is more mobile. We all feel that we've come up with a version that looks extremely handsome, and is more expressive, lighter on its feet, and more imaginative than the previous version."
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For Eyre, the greatest challenge in working on
Mary Poppins was retaining its emotional center. "These musicals are leviathans, and it's easy to get crushed by the size," he says. "The most important thing about the show is the humanity, and I'm most pleased that
Mary Poppins breathes with a human voice and spirit."
Ashley Brown, Justin Hall‚ Aida Neitenbach and Gavin Lee in Mary Poppins
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