Scripts Lesson 28

Extra Work: A spoonful of Sugar: Mary Poppins the musical (in your CD)


Script.

Don: Hello, I’m Don Dahler, welcome to 20/20 in touch, our weekday webcast. These days, if you have a TV, you probably come across that stern task master with a heart of gold: Supper Nanny. But what about to take you back in time to the original nanny: Mary Poppins: only now making its debut on Broadway in a lavish new musical : here’s Bob Brown.

Chim chiminey

Chim chiminey

Chim chim cher-ee!

A sweep is as lucky

As lucky can be

Bob: Do you remember seeing the film when you were young?

Ashley: Oh yeah, I watched that movie one million times

Bob: To listen to Ashley Brown you wouldn’t think it first that this 24-year old from Gulf Breeze, Florida would be the one to inherit this iconic role: the perfect British Nanny with the perfect British accent.

Julie: “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun”.

Bob: People do hear your Florida accent when you talk. And you’re playing a proper British nanny

Ashley: Uh-huh.

Bob: How do you go back and forth between the two?

Ashley: I think it’s just something you learn.

Bob: Ashley Brown, like the character she plays Is wise beyond her years. Talented in surprising ways. She has vocal trained since childhood, she already has played the role of Belle in “Beauty and the Beast”. And it was in her dressing room during that production that Tom Schumacher, the head of Disney Theatricals told her she has gotten the role of a lifetime:

Tom: And I walked in the door and up the stairs to the dressing room

Ashley: He umh, you know why I’m here, right? And I said, no, but I’m feeling sick, you’d better tell me

Tom: And then there was much screaming from her and I left but I said “keep this a secret.

Ashley: And I collapsed on the floor and he held me for about two minutes, I was bawling,

Tom: By the time I got down to 46th street I think everybody on Broadway had already heard.

Bob: 80 years ago Mary Poppins made her first appearance in the story as the creation of a writer named PL Travers whose own strange story was uncovered in a recent biography titled “Mary Poppins, she wrote”. Travers whose real name was Hellen Lindon Gawph spent an unhappy childhood in Australia before moving to England. Mary Poppins may have been cheery, P. L. Traverse was not. And when the Disney Studios bought the rights for a movie and Traverse consulted with composer Richard Chairman about songs that would be included in a Mary Poppins film, she was emphatic about what she liked.

Richard: And she came up with “Grease Sleeves”, Pop goes a whiz”, I mean, she had all these wonderful songs that she…and I had to explain to her one day “Mrs. Traverse, everybody loves “Grease Sleeves, but we’re going to try to do new material for this picture. She didn’t quite understand why.