The Real Mary Poppins ; a Fascinating South Bank Show, Directed by Nigel Wattis, Reveals the Troubled Life of Mary Poppins Creator Pl Travers, Walt Disney's16- Year Struggle to Make the Film and Behind-the Scenes Action From the Hit New Stage Musical.

Summary

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She is the flying nanny with the parrot-headed umbrella and flowerpot hat, an embodiment of magic, who can glide up banisters and talk to animals. Now Mary Poppins immortalised by Julie Andrews in the 1964 film has blown in on the east wind to revive a flagging West End. On the 70th anniversary of the publication of the first Mary Poppins book and 40 years after Disney's timeless classic, containing such memorable songs as A Spoonful of Sugar and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Cameron Mackintosh and Disney have joined forces to stage a stunning new musical version, which opened this month at the Prince Edward theatre, London.

On Boxing Day, The South Bank Show shows how the original film and the new musical were made. The documentary, directed by Nigel Wattis, also charts the astonishing story of the character's creator, Pamela Lyndon Travers. Using audio tapes broadcast for the first time, unpublished correspondence and interviews with friends, film and theatre professionals and Travers's adopted son, the programme reveals the secrets of the enigmatic writer, who died in 1996 aged 96.

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The Real Mary Poppins ; a Fascinating South Bank Show, Directed by Nigel Wattis, Reveals the Troubled Life of Mary Poppins Creator Pl Travers, Walt Disney's16- Year Struggle to Make the Film and Behind-the Scenes Action From the Hit New Stage Musical.

'Travers created this character of Mary Poppins, who arrives out of nowhere to fix the problems of a dysfunctional family,' says producer Pamela Esterson, who first had the idea of making a documentary about Travers ten years ago.

'The irony is, of course, that she ended up creating her own dysfunctional family by adopting a boy, one of a pair of twins. She didn't tell her son about his origins until his brother knocked on the door of their London house 1...

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