Tackling a sequel to a beloved classic is difficult for a writer or director, but imagine the responsibility of composing new songs to an iconic musical that has wowed generations for over 50 years? That was the job Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman signed on for when they began working with Rob Marshall on “Mary Poppins Returns,” but despite the fearsome responsibility, there are some gigs you simply can’t say no to.
The follow up to the 1964 film smartly doesn’t try to duplicate any of the Sherman Bros. masterworks such as “A Spoonful of Sugar” or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” but there are some standouts with “Can You Imagine That?” and “A Cover Is Not The Book.” Strangely, neither was submitted for Oscar consideration. Luckily for Shaiman and Whitman, both “Trip a Light Fantastic” and “The Place Where Lost Things Go” made the shortlist for Best Original Song consideration.
Both Shaiman and Whitman jumped on the phone last month to discuss the genesis for many of the film’s new songs, the historical reference to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rapping and the joy of working with the legendary Angela Lansbury, among other topics.
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Gregory Ellwood: The first question for you guys is, how did you get ingrained in the writing process for this film? How did that work?
Scott Whitman: Well, first we were terrified. But because P.L. Travers had written so many books in the series, we sort of dove into those through the many books that followed the original “Mary Poppins” book. There was a series of adventures that we felt could be musicalized in the telling of our story, so we gathered with Rob Marshall, John DeLuca and David Magee for a series of months before we even put pen to paper. Just figuring out what songs and what we wanted to say musically and lyrically.
Gregory Ellwood: I know in a process like this you probably write tons of songs that never make it to the film. Is there any song that’s in the movie now that was the ground floor for whatever else you wrote? Where you’re like, “We always know this is going to be in the movie and we sort of expand everything from here.”
Marc Shaiman: Once we wrote “The Place Where Lost Things Go,” the kind of lullaby-ballad that she sings to the kids about how to come to terms with loss and how to find some sort of a way for kids to understand how to deal with that. That song everyone seemed to really go, “O.K. Bullseye. That’s good.” On the other hand, with the first song that Lin-Manuel sings, we wrote that first and then proceeded to write four other songs for his character. Almost before the bell went off and it was time to go into the recording studios, where everyone just said, “You know what, we should go back to the first one that you guys wrote.” Everyone was kind of scared of how it’s a gentler opening and how to present Lin-Manuel in this film and making sure that people are going to get what they want from him. So everyone’s maybe just had different ideas about, “What’s the best way to present him?” But then everyone just kind of got confident that throughout the film, he does get presented and is able to do you know, the things that people want. Especially when we knew that we had the number in the animated sequence that really allows him to go to town with verbal dexterity. So that one we circled all the ways back around to the first song.
Gregory Ellwood: Which is “Lovely London Sky,” correct?
Scott Whitman: Yes, correct.
Marc Shaiman: Right.
Gregory Ellwood: You’re tackling a movie that’s a sequel to a beloved classic that’s 50 years old, and has songs in like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” that multiple generations have grown up with. What was the conversation about saying, “Hey listen, we can’t do a sequel to that song.” And, correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t feel like there’s a thematic sequel to the movie to that song in particular.
Scott Whitman: Well, I think that once we had our story and it was time to write, I think we just sort of put our heads in the paper, and in the words, and tried to tell this story. I don’t think we ever said, “Oh we’ve gotta write a ‘Supercalifragilistic’ or we have to write a ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee.'” Rob, because he’s a man of the theater as well, was adamant that the song move the story along. So it was more about, “What serves this story?” Not, “What serves the first movie?”
Marc Shaiman: But there’s no question that Rob also hired us knowing that we can write in a certain style that would match. The person who put it best was Lin-Manuel, I recently read he said that our new movie rhymes with the first film. Which is just a great way to put it. We knew it had to sound like it came from the same world and lived in the same neighborhood and didn’t sound like a complete departure. But we also knew that we can’t write another “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” or nor would we ask the performers to try to perform songs that would so make everyone have to be compared at every second to all the iconic material in the first movie. But since I was four years old I’ve been listening to that record. So it’s in my DNA, and if there is anything in the film that touches the same kind of feeling or sound, it’s because we couldn’t help ourselves. We realized in the writing that we could just express our love and our thanks to the Sherman brothers and to Irwin Kostal, and to everyone else involved …
Scott Whitman: Julie and Walt and all of them.
Marc Shaiman: -to Julie Andrews and Walt Disney, that this was our chance to almost speak for our generation, which sounds kind of pompous to say. But that we had this chance to put it into music and lyrics, “Thank you,” and “We love this,” and “Here’s just our way to tip our hat.” And once we had that, it wasn’t as scary.
Gregory Ellwood: I’m sure you’re very excited when the producers ask you to do” The Sound Of Music” sequel.
Scott Whitman: Yeah but that’s a sad story though, all they do is keep running from Nazis.
Gregory Ellwood: Hey, move it twenty years forward it could be about the Berlin Wall, there’s so much you could do with the “Sound of Music,” but I wanted to ask specifically about the time period. This new film is set 25 years after the original in 1930s London. Was that an inspiration for the music at all?
Scott Whitman: Of course it was, that time in London they had such a lovely expression for it -because the depression it was just called “The Slump.” We were fans of this duo called Flanagan and Allen who wrote a lot of songs about the working man, but who always in the deepest, darkest moment found joy and hope. So, that kind of influence perhaps, Lin’s first number “The Lovely London Sky.”
Gregory Ellwood: I’ll be honest, my favorite number and song in the movie is “A Cover Is Not The Book.” And I believe that’s the one where Lin-Manuel has a moment where he sort of raps, but he doesn’t really rap.
Scott Whitman: Yeah well, except back then it would have been called patter. It would have been very British music hall to do that. Danny Kaye was popular in the States doing that kind of fast talk and it’s really just a grandfather of rap.
Gregory Ellwood: I guess my question was, were there discussions about, “O.K, is this too on the nose to do this with Lin?”
Marc Shaiman: Yeah, well the real conversations were, “Do we need to do it earlier so the audience feels like, ‘O.K. Lin-Manuel is getting to do something that reminds us of what we already know from him.'”
Scott Whitman: But because of the setting of the musical in the story, that that felt the appropriate time because it’s a non-stage number.
Marc Shaiman: And I can send you links to songs from the time, from the turn of the century right on up to the 30s and 40s that are fully like that. Stanley Holloway, who played the father in “My Fair Lady,” he was actually famous in his day for songs just like that. These really fast songs that are just so enjoyable to try to figure out, “What is the person saying, it’s going along so fast.” And they’re always, always about the working man and the joy that they find in their [profession].
Scott Whitman: But in that number, all the songs, all the stories Lin and Emily are telling, are from other P.L. Travers stories. So, we tried to wrap that in there as well.
Gregory Ellwood: Additionally, I spoke to Rob this morning for another story I’m doing and he was telling me about how he went to Meryl asking her if she wanted to be in it. And he made it sound as though it was early in the process, and that the character she’s playing the books which I was unaware of, was a man.
Marc Shaiman: Ah yes, Topsy Turvy.
Gregory Ellwood: Had you written that song knowing Meryl was going to sing it?
Marc Shaiman: Well, I mean, when we wrote it, we did write it for a woman. You know what? I remember now. [We knew Mary] was gonna go visit a relative and they were gonna sort of end up on their heads and falling about a room. We said, you know, just by chance it was so close to “I Love To Laugh” when they go to visit Uncle Albert [in the original film]. That we made the decision before Meryl Streep was cast, to turn around and make it a woman. Just to try to make it not seem like we were all trying to replicate “I Love to Laugh.”
Scott Whitman: So it was also a great chance for us to create this gypsy swing [and] her accent is vaguely unfamiliar.
Marc Shaiman: And that’s another question you had about [influences from] the time period, Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt. Django Reinhardt was a great jazz guitarist and Stephane Grappelli was the violinist he worked with a lot. And they created this sound back then called gypsy swing, and so … that’s probably not correct.
Scott Whitman: It’s 1930s swing.
Marc Shaiman: It does seem like an appropriate kind of music, once again, to have in a musical or any story that’s taking place in the 1930s. So that just seemed perfectly suited undetermined background.
Gregory Ellwood: My last question, is regarding the closing number, “Nowhere to Go But Up” featuring the Balloon Lady from the books. How did that song come about?
Marc Shaiman: Spoiler alert. Michael Banks [Ben Whishaw] gets back in touch with the joy [he had as] a child. And so, the fact that there was one of these stories in the books, and in the book, it’s not about Michael Banks finding the child within again, it’s just about this woman in the park who sells balloons. But her balloons are magical, and if you look into them and you see your true self, see who it is that you really are and what you want to be and what and what you love, you will take to the skies.
Scott Whitman: You’ll soar.
Marc Shaiman: And so we all just realized, that will be the perfect moment for Michael Banks to have this cathartic change, you know, an epiphany. So it just matched the story that we were telling.
Gregory Ellwood: And obviously you have the wonderful Angela Lansbury singing it. Can you talk about what that meant to you guys to have such an icon on board?
Scott Whitman: Her voice is in it, Dick Van Dyke as well, there’s the fact that they’re singing our words is overwhelming.
Marc Shaiman: Yeah. I mean, I’ve grown up my whole life listening to Angela Lansbury sing. I don’t think Scott likes to refer to either one of as “old theater queens”. But, one could say that we could be perhaps described by anyway, from “Mame” to “Dear World” to “Gypsy,” “Sweeney Todd.” To hear Angela Lansbury singing a song that we wrote, there are not words -and we’re lyricists – but there aren’t words.
Scott Whitman: That’s because she has such a special place in the Disney canon.
Gregory Ellwood: And not only that, she sounds great for 93.
Marc Shaiman: I know! Yeah, she sounds just like herself. I mean, she sounds phenomenal. I still really can’t believe it, I almost still can’t believe that Angela Lansbury is singing a song we wrote.
“Mary Poppins Returns” is now playing nationwide.