Magic makes Broomsticks a real high f lyer
When negotiations for the film rights to Mary Poppins stalled, Disney started developing Bedknobs And Broomsticks, another story about a mysterious woman teaching children valuable life lessons, this one based on novels by The Borrowers author Mary Norton. But it didn’t see the light of day until 1971.
The two films have much in common. Same director, songs from the same writing duo, the Sherman Brothers, and strong female leads in Julie Andrews and Angela Lansbury respectively. And now, like Mary Poppins, Bedknobs
And Broomsticks has been turned into an enchanting stage musical.
Eccentric Eglantine Price (Dianne Pilkington, above) lives alone in a remote coastal village and reluctantly takes in the three traumatised Rawlins children evacuated from London during the Blitz.
Price is an apprentice witch, learning sorcery through a correspondence course because she’s had a vision of an enemy invasion (Nazis in the film but, oddly, never explicitly referred to as such here) and wants to help fight the baddies.
She is missing a crucial spell, ‘substitutiary locomotion’, which brings inanimate objects to life, and she and the children take off on a magic airborne bed in an effort to find it, with her supposed magic professor Emelius Browne (Charles Brunton) their first port of call. There are adventures in London, under the sea and on an island of animals.
The songs are charming – the standouts are The Beautiful Briny and Portobello Road, a big song-and-dance number for the whole company – and the performances delightful, especially from the West End legend Pilkington. The excellent ensemble also deserves special mention; as well as singing and dancing, they operate the fabulous puppets, skilfully shift scenery and generally work their socks off.
But it is the thrillingly imaginative staging and illusions that most of the audience are talking about after a truly magical show. You’ll believe a bed can fly.
There was a little bit of magic of a different kind in Jersey Boys. Yes, the Boys are back in town. The beloved jukebox musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons has returned to the West End with a new cast. This fast-moving, crowd-pleasing show about the rise and demise of the New Jersey pop idols is jam-packed with hits. Fresh out of drama school, newcomer Ben Joyce (second from left) plays
Valli, and he appeared visibly moved and, for a moment, emotionally overcome by the prolonged, rapturous whooping and applause prompted by his fine rendition of the second act’s big number, Can’t Take My
Eyes Off You. It was the very definition of a showstopper and one of those spine-tingling moments that only live performance provides.