[QUOTE=Roderick Femm;20360237
By the way, I thought the movie Mary Poppins was a horrible saccharine mess and she was nothing much to write home about in it.[/QUOTE]
Anyone who read the books agrees, bur Julie Andrews did a fine job of playing the role as written.
Lucille Ball couldn’t sing, and even said so in interviews. When she did interviews for Mame, she was weirdly “Gee, shucks, I don’t know why they cast me.”
My mother saw Lansbury on stage in Mame and said she was brilliant. I was in utero at the time, but I did once see a video of Lansbury and Bea Arthur doing “Bosum Buddies,” and it was great. Apparently they remained friends after doing the show together.
We watched Grease last night and once again we were all commenting on how none of them look even remotely close to high school age. I never saw the stage show, was that true also?
Interesting because my daughter had to write a paper recently for school. She had to write an Act 6 for Pygmalion explaining who, if anyone Eliza should end up with. We were talking about it, and my first choice was Pickering for the reasons you said. I do think he was more like a father to her though. Anyway, in the paper my daughter left her single.
Barry Bostwick was 27 when he originated the role of Danny Zuko in the Broadway production of Grease. Leslie Goto, who played Sandy, was a year or two younger.
The good thing about stage performances is that they don’t have close-ups. Mary Martin was 41 when she played Peter Pan and 46 when she played Maria in Sound of Music.
I’m not a Madonna fan at all, or much of a music fan for that matter, but Evita actually kind of made me respect her as an artist rather than some girly-girl. I’d only ever seen it on stage once at that point. I know it was Detroit, so probably the late 1980’s when I was still too young to appreciate it? It would have not been Patti Lupone, though. I hesitate to think I wouldn’t appreciate it as a late teenager, though, as I also loved Phantom (Toronto) at that age, and others.
Well, no, not “anyone.” The movie is certainly kinder and gentler than the books, where Mary Poppins is a remarkably stern martinet whose affection for the Banks children is a lot better disguised than in the movie. (OTOH, British nannies in that era were not paid based on affection; if anything, the opposite.)
But if “saccharine” might describe the movie, “mess” does not, at least not in comparison to the novels. I am an “anyone” who likes the movie a great deal better than the books:).
The original Mary Poppins book isn’t bad, but it’s very uneven. Some of the adventures and characters are creative, fanciful, and exciting, and some are just…not. When I was a fulltime elementary school teacher I read the book aloud to a class one year. It was not a success. Part of it was the characterization of Poppins herself, which they found very off-putting–as one kid said, “She’s so MEAN!” But they also just didn’t find the adventures especially intriguing. Even the chapters I rather liked fell flat. “Would not use as a read-aloud again” (The Britishness of the book may have played a role, though I’m pretty sure I read some Roald Dahl that year, and kids always loved his stuff; the age of the books probably didn;t make a difference, as that class loved the more ancient Wizard of Oz.)
And about the Mary Poppins sequels, the less said, the better.
–About Angela Lansbury: at the age of about six, my daughter, who we adopted a little over 30 years ago, used to imagine that Lansbury was her biological mother. She had seen a few exrpts of Murder, She Wrote, and she knew that Lansbury was the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. She knew, mostly, that it wasn’t true, but it was very sweet.