Ah, well. With Over the Rainbow on the telly, it reminds me that this attempt to stage an already-popular film musical with additional songs is nothing new. It's been done before with Mary Poppins which married the Disney songs of the Sherman Brothers, Robert and Richard, with new songs by British songwriters Stiles and Drewe. Their songwriting styles were close enough to be integrated smoothly into one show and, by my count, the final score is about half and half.
As one pithy critic put it, George Stiles and Anthony Drewe are the Tim Henman of musicals which, I suppose, makes Mary Poppins like winning the doubles at Wimbledon: very impressive but not quite the Big Prize. This is a touch unfair to Stiles and Drewe. As well as Mary Poppins their children's show, Honk, has played around the world. But there is still the nagging feeling that they haven't quite landed the big family classic - a Cats, a Joseph, a Sound of Music.
It's hard to say whether the stage version of Mary Poppins would have been the same success if we didn't already know and love those Sherman songs already. Songs such as "Feed the Birds", "Chim Chim Cher-ee" and "Supercaliwotsidoodah..." are part of the popular culture. Having said that, Stiles and Drewe did produce one of their best songs in "Practically Perfect". The word-play, internal rhymes and that quick little 4-note phrase on each "practically" all precisely catch the annoying smugness of the upright Mary Poppins:
Practically Perfect in ev'ry way
Practically Perfect so people say
Each virtue virtually knows no bound
Each trait is great and patently sound
And at the end of the chorus, that 4-note phrase is exquisitely stretched out, syllable by syllable, with the "ev'ry" turned into "ev-e-ry" like an elocution teacher patronising her pupils:
I'm so Prac-ti-cal-ly Perfect
In ev-e-ry way
This is subtle and clever songwriting from an undeniably talented team. But it's also fair to say they had a bit of head start with Mary Poppins.
There's another comparison to be made between Stiles and Drewe and the Sherman Brothers. Both teams also had a crack at Rudyard Kipling. The Shermans were recruited by Disney to do the songs for the animated version of The Jungle Book and Stiles and Drewe got their first break with a stage version of the Just So Stories.
The musical version of Just So has gone through various incarnations since its first productions in the mid-’80s but has never quite caught on (although I suspect its latest version may go on to do well on the schools and youth circuit). The Jungle Book, on the other hand, is still considered a Disney classic. You could put this down to power of the Big Mouse and you’d have a point. But Just So had Cameron Mackintosh on its side and he’s no slouch. Not to mention a roll call of top advisors, including Stephen Sondheim and Mike Ockrent, who helped to develop the material. Steven Spielberg even bought the animation rights. If ever a show was bound for the popular mainstream, it was surely this one. So here we have two songwriting teams of similar ability and style adapting a collection of short stories for children by the same author and each involving a lot of animal characters. Why was one adaptation more successful than the other?
I caught Just So at Chichester Festival Theatre a few years back. On the face of it Rudyard Kipling has a lot to offer a musical adaptor. His prose is full of word-play and sing-songy rhythms (“Before the High and Far-Off Times, O My Best Beloved, came the Time of the Very Beginnings”). But musicals can't rely on word-play alone. They have to have character or, to be more accurate, they have to express character. This is where Just So doesn't quite succeed. Much of the score is warm and witty and charming but the songs don't quite follow through with the characterisations. Let me take a couple of examples to make the point.
Take the characters of the Zebra and Giraffe who totter around in high heels like two Essex clubbers on a girls’ night out. In the spoken bits they whine and whinney in the vulgar venacular of today (“Wha’evaaar!”). But for their number “Pick Up Your Hooves and Trot” they’re suddenly singing in a completely different voice:
Wouldn’t it be amazing
If we could both be grazing
Far from the common herd?
So Pick Up Your Hooves and Trot, girl
Not another word!
That last little formulation,“Not another word!”, is just too quaint for a couple of loud-mouthed laddettes on the razz; it’s Sharon and Tracy sounding more like Flanders and Swann.
In The Jungle Book, on the other hand, the songs are much more in tune with the characters singing them. One of the great scenes in the film is when the King of the Monkey-People tries to persuade Mowgli to teach him how to be human. “I Wanna Be Like You” is a peach of a song and catches the frivolous chatter and general aping around of the wannabe human:
Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!
Oh, oobee doo
I Wanna Be Like You...
In a way, this is a similar kind of a song as "Pick Up Your Hooves and Trot". It has the same kind of animal-related word-play ("monkeying around"/"common herd") but the Sherman's song is much more in character. The slang, the swinging tempo, the energetic Dixie rhythm, the jazzy scat, the monkey-like “you-oo-oo” rhymes, the voices, the animation, it’s all so in synch. It’s a brilliant moment which has embeds itself in your mind because the song fits the characters so well. It’s the kind of moment that Just So, for all its charms, never quite finds.
Stiles and Drewe have been the "future" of British musicals for, ooh, a good twenty years now. But really they are old-fashioned writers. A lot of their songs sound as if they could have been written decades ago. That’s not a criticism, by the way. They are best known for writing for young children who probably care less about whether their music is fashionable or not than, say, a teenage audience might. That's also no bar to mainstream success; Lord Andy's music has never been fashionable. But the truth is that despite being the only musical writers, post-Lloyd Webber, to have made a real go of it, their songs and shows haven't quite matched the kind of popular success that the Sherman's songs enjoy.
Yet.
They have undoubted talents. With the right story, the right character and the right songs, who knows? Maybe they can win Wimbledon. Anything can happen.
(Mary Poppins, Just So and The Jungle Book available on Spotify)
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