The pressure of composing new music for ‘Mary Poppins’
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Everyone involved in the making of “Mary Poppins Returns ” felt the pressure to do justice to the original 1964 film.
Rob Marshall worked on it for three straight years. Animators came out of retirement to do hand-drawn animation in the style of the first. Sets were built. Cast members moved their family to London for a year. But perhaps no one short of Emily Blunt and Marshall were as heavy with responsibility as composer Marc Shaiman and his co-lyricist Scott Wittman. They had the Oscar-winning songwriting duo Robert and Richard Sherman to live up to, after all.
Shaiman, who composed the score and nine original songs for the new film, credits the Shermans for getting him interested in music to begin with. He remembers being four-years-old and listening to the “Mary Poppins” album and thinking, “This is what I want to do with my life.”
“He was a precocious 4-year-old,” added Wittman, who has known Shaiman for over four decades. The two are Broadway mainstays and have worked together on the “Hairspray” and “Catch Me if You Can” musicals.