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MARY POPPINS – Richard M. Sherman, Robert B. Sherman, Irwin Kostal
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Walt Disney had long kept the book Mary Poppins in his office and was determined to one day bring it to the big screen for his daughters. The book series authored by P. L. Travers offered a series of fantastic tales, which unfortunately lacked a cohesive story. Disney tasked the Sherman brothers and screenplay writer Don DaGradi to create a cogent narrative. Robert Stevenson was tasked with directing the film and he secured a fine cast, which included Julie Andrews making her acting debut as Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke as Bert, David Tomlinson as George Banks, Glynis Johns as Winifred Banks, and Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber the Banks children Jane and Michael. The story tells the tale of a nanny who comes to the aid of a family in disarray. She uses her magical gifts to bring back joy into the lives of the children, but to also reconnect George with his family. The movie was both a critical and commercial success earning eight Academy Award nominations, winning five for Best Actress, Best Film Editing, Best Special Effects, Best Original Song and Best Film Score. Read more…
Remembering Irwin Kostal, 1911-1994
Composer, arranger, orchestrator and conductor Irwin Kostal died ten years ago today, on November 23, 1994, in Studio City, California, at the age of 83, following a heart attack.
One of the great musical craftsmen of the Hollywood musical, Kostal’s career encompassed Broadway, television and cinema, and included two Academy Awards for his work on West Side Story and The Sound of Music. He was also closely associated with Walt Disney, supervising the music for several of the studio’s most celebrated live-action musicals.
Kostal was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 1, 1911, into a Czech-American family. He began playing piano as a child but was largely self-taught, learning orchestration by studying the scores of Beethoven, Debussy and other composers in his local library. After working as a dance-band musician in Chicago, he became an arranger for the NBC radio program Design for Listening. He moved to New York in 1946 and subsequently worked on television programs including Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and The Garry Moore Show.
By the late 1950s Kostal had become one of Broadway’s leading orchestrators. His most important early assignment was Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), whose complex mixture of jazz, Latin rhythms, symphonic writing and Broadway song was orchestrated by Kostal and Sid Ramin. He also worked on shows including Fiorello! and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
When West Side Story reached the screen in 1961, Kostal joined Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green and Ramin in adapting Bernstein’s music for the much larger resources of the film orchestra. The result retained the rhythmic ferocity of the stage score while giving numbers such as “Tonight,” “America,” “Maria” and the climactic ballet sequences an enormous cinematic sweep. The four men shared the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, one of ten Oscars won by the film. Read more…
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