The inspirational platitudes in “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” sound more like greeting-card poetry than the hymn-like profundity achieved by its obvious precursor, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel, and the coy attempt at humor in “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” is really more annoying than charming. To be honest, I’ve never understood why the “lark who is learning to pray” line in the title-song gets so much grief (I think it’s a pretty well-chosen description of who Maria is at this point in the plot), but despite its marvelous melody, the inane list of mundane objects in the lyrics to “My Favorite Things” borders on the idiotic. It’s still flawed, admittedly: the stage book, the only one to an R&H musical not penned by Hammerstein himself, was mediocre at best and entirely too saccharine, and while the film script improves upon it for the most part, especially in the placement of the songs, the results are still severely uneven, with intelligent and touching scenes alternating with clumsy and irritatingly cute ones.Īlso, Hammerstein was dealing with his final illness when he wrote the lyrics for this score, and it seems to have taken something of a toll on their quality. The Sound of Music, which began as a stage Musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein at the end of the Fifties, was a much more respectable item.
#SUPERCAL BRAODWAY FULL#
“Sister Suffragette” is an utter waste of time, the warmed-over Henry Higgins imitation “The Life I Lead” gets pounded into the ground with an endless string of reprises, and I refuse to believe anyone over the age of seven actually likes “Supercal…”, as it’s been dubbed by people quite reasonably unwilling to type out the full multisyllabic nonsense title. There are gems, to be sure, especially the quieter moments like “Chim-Chim-Cheree” and “Feed the Birds”, but there’s also no shortage of duds.
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The score also tends to be remembered as better than it actually is. And Dick Van Dyke, for all his talent, gave probably the worst performance of his career in this one: there’s a reason jokes about his appalling fake Cockney accent have been a persistent meme for the last fifty-plus years, and even Van Dyke himself was mortified when he saw the film and realized how terrible he sounded. Andrews does sing beautifully in her musical numbers here, but the character didn’t give her much in the way of acting opportunities, beyond being genially charming, unflappable, and slightly mysterious.
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And while Julie Andrews may have won an Oscar for her performance, it was purely meant to be a consolation prize because the judges thought she should have been cast in the film version of My Fair Lady that came out the same year. The film is not without merit, admittedly, and is certainly more polished and capable than its most immediate predecessor (the 1961 Disney film adaptation of Babes in Toyland), but it is not remotely the masterpiece it is generally treated as by those who grew up with it.įor one thing, like most of Disney’s feature films features around that time, whether animated or live-action, Mary Poppins doesn’t really have a plot, or even a particularly focused throughline: it’s episodic, with one delightful but rather pointless whimsical set-piece scene after another. Mary Poppins is one of those movies that is regarded with arguably more affection than it really deserves because most of its fanbase first saw it when they were about six years old.
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The hyping-up of Musical Comedy’s size and bombast was not limited to the stage: the phenomenon was, indeed, arguably even more severe among film musicals, largely due to the unprecedented success of two massive hits: Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music.