When I express an opinion here, I can usually count on a deluge of e-mails that disagree, sometimes rudely, with whatever I said. There are times when you feel you could write "Robbing orphans at gunpoint is not a nice thing to do" and you'd hear from an angry, outraged mob who insisted it was and how could any sane person possibly think otherwise? So I'm a little startled how many messages I've received that agreed with my disappointment with the musical stage version of Mary Poppins and how I've gotten none from anyone who enjoyed it. (I've also heard from a lot of folks who said, "Thank God! I thought I was the only one in the world who didn't like Carousel!")
More and more as I think about the former, I'm thinking of things I didn't like about it...and this might be a good time for one of my snazzy SPOILER ALERT signs...
Okay, now I feel I can talk without fear of ruining the show for you. I'm not saying not to see it, by the way; just to lower your expectations way, way down. Brace yourself, for example, for the fact that the title character doesn't feel all that magical. She does magic tricks but they seem to be emanating more from the stage crew than from her. Bert the Chimney Sweep feels more magical than she does, by far. He was kind of inexplicably magical in the movie too, but there, you felt that his magic was made possible by his proximity to her. His made hers feel more special. On stage, his upstages hers. Everything Bert does upstages Mary Poppins.
I also didn't mention, as many readers reminded me, that Act Two pretty much starts with Mary Poppins killing someone in a pretty gruesome manner. What the hell was that all about? I'll get back to that in a sec.
The kids are pretty boring and there's no sense that their lives are changed by hanging around Ms. Poppins; just that she entertains them for a while. Also, I might have noted a problem with the main plot, which is that Mr. Banks is worried about losing the income from his job at the bank.
It's tough for us to care about possible job loss with regard to a banker...and doubly tough to fret for a banker with a beautiful mansion and a staff of servants. In the movie, Mr. Banks had an attitude problem about his job. He cared way too much about it. P.L. Travers named him as she named him for a reason; his whole identity was inextricably lost in that financial institution. Still, the way she (and later, the Disney folks) configured things, we cared about Mr. Banks not as a banker but as a father...one who was way too worried about providing for his family to the extent of neglecting his children and his own inner child. In the end, he rediscovered all those children, especially his inner one, and realized that there could be more to life than earning a living.
Mr. Banks on stage pays brief lip service to that realization but basically, his problem is solved not because he changes but because he just plain doesn't lose his job. His happy ending, such as it is, isn't that he becomes a better person. It's that he becomes a more highly-paid banker. And as I said in my first review, Mary Poppins doesn't have much to do with that.
Mrs. Banks, who was in many ways the most interesting character in the film, is similarly diminished. The movie version of the lady gave purpose to her life as a Suffragette. She may have had to leave her kids to a series of nannies because she was busy but at least she was busy for a good cause. The Mrs. Banks of the play doesn't seem to have much to do. She throws some sort of luncheon for people who don't show up and then it's never mentioned again. So, uh, Mrs. Banks...why don't you raise your kids instead of handing them over to another in a series of strangers?
In the middle of the musical, Mary Poppins leaves inexplicably. Her credo is that she comes to a household and stays until she achieves her mission, whatever it is for that particular family. But just before Intermission, when she couldn't possibly have achieved anything, she leaves. The parents come up with a demonic replacement — one who (I think, it's not clear) was once Mr. Banks's nanny. So I guess the idea is that when Mary Poppins returns, she rescues the kids from turning out like Mr. Banks. But she oughta be rescuing them from parents who'd hire someone that evil as a babysitter.
So we don't like the parents for hiring such a replacement. And we don't like Mary for throwing her little hissy fit or whatever her reason was for walking/flying off the job and abandoning the kids to such a monster. I like her for getting rid of the monster but not so much for how she does it, which feels like capital punishment for a non-capital crime. I don't like anyone on that stage, except maybe Bert, and don't care what becomes of them. And I especially don't like me for going on so long on this topic.
To be fair, I didn't feel all of the above while I was sitting there, intermittently enjoying what was on stage. But the more I thought about the movie after viewing it, the more I liked it. The more I thought about the play, the more I liked the movie. Which is why the film will endure forever and the musical will end when the tour does.
This is a clip from Keith Olbermann's show which might interest (and even please) those who don't like Keith Olbermann. I thought it was at least a semi-extraordinary moment in cable television.
One recent night on his show, Jon Stewart took Olbermann to task for certain remarks. That alone was unusual. Folks who deal in televised opinion programming almost never criticize those on their side of the aisle. Stewart is way too close to unique. I am amazed when his detractors say he never goes after Obama or other Democrats or Liberals. These folks are not watching his show.
And you almost never see the person who is criticized admit that the criticism is correct and accept responsibility for it. Sean Hannity admitted that Stewart was right recently when he pointed out that Hannity's show had passed news footage of one event after another but Hannity claimed it was a mistake. In the clip you're about to see, Olbermann simply admits that Stewart is right and that he's misbehaved. That also is generally unprecedented.
Jon Stewart is beginning to occupy an amazing role in TV punditry — a position halfway between the media criticism of David Gergen and the conscience watchdogging of Jiminy Cricket. Bill O'Reilly had Stewart on this week and tried very hard to achieve four things at the same time. One was, of course, to garner some ratings with the booking. Another was to satisfy the Fox viewers that he was slapping around the Misguided Liberal. Yet another was to show he was as witty as the Misguided Liberal. And the fourth thing was to win the approval of the Misguided Liberal. I'm not sure he didn't achieve all four objectives to some extent. (If you didn't see the interview on O'Reilly's show, he has it in three edited parts on his website. But I recommend watching the unedited interview, which runs 42 minutes.)
Anyway, here's the Countdown with Keith Olbermann segment, which includes the entire piece that Stewart did about him, followed by Olbermann's response. I would like to believe Olbermann was sincere because, in a medium where everyone seems to defend everything they do to the death, it's nice to see a gracious acceptance of criticism. And I do think Keith has toned it down a bit lately...which is impressive because these guys never tone it down...
February 7, 2010
