When you're a very young Canberra singer and dancer you dream of how supercalifragilisticexpialidocious it would be to get a major part in a production of Mary Poppins.
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On Friday morning and on a stage just in front of Woolworths at the mysterious Majura Park Shopping Complex (why do so many shoppers find so remote a place a supercali-you-know place to shop?) 13 hopefuls sang and danced for a panel of judges.
For when When the Free Rain Theatre Company stages Mary Poppins in March next year it is going to need a boy and a girl to play the parts of the Banks children, Jane and Michael. In the musical they are the troubled children (they want their stiff and chilly father to show that he loves them) who win the magical Mary Poppins as their new, life-changing nanny.
Friday's 13 performed, singing above the sounds of busy shopping going on all around them, for judges who included Free Rain's artistic director Ann Somes and Jacquelyn Richards, who will be the show's choreographer. All of Friday's performers will go on to a major audition on October 18 but Friday was the chance, if they could take it, to make an early impression.
All of this may not have been all fun for the nervous mothers of the performers but for shoppers and this reporter it was great because so many of the chosen songs were so catchy and so familiar. I joined in (softly, and over near Donut King and well away from the stage) with Wouldn't It Be Luvverly, Consider Yerself (One Of Us) and that great song for our troubled times and as we languish under an Abbott government, My Favourite Things. In the latter song the songster sings of how "When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when the government appalls me with its asylum seeker policies, when I'm feeling sad,/I simply remember my favourite things [such as warm woollen mittens and whiskers on kittens] and then I don't feel so bad."
I wasn't a judge but quite an impression was made on me (I left Donut King and came in close to the stage to see and hear her better) by Katy Larkin, 12. She was animated and expressive (several performers in their nervousness kept their little arms velcroed to their sides). Singing Part Of Your World from The Little Mermaid, the song of a wistful mermaid, she sounded exactly as actual wistful mermaids almost certainly do sound in the real world. Please don't think me precocious for using the word yet again, but her performance was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Had she been nervous, up on the stage in such a public place?
"No, I was so excited and it was such a fun experience. I loved doing it. Every second of it!" the confident songstress trilled to me.
She'd sung without a music sheet and revealed that, yes, she'd rehearsed and rehearsed at home, singing the plaintive little ditty (though it cheers up a bit at the end) to her mum and her dad and her brother.
"Part Of Your World is about Arial. She's a mermaid, and she wants to see the world the other [above the surface] world that she's not in. But her dad won't let her."
She got out the music to read (in a sweet, confident, half-singing way) the song's words to me. It emerges that Arial has one of the world's great collections of discarded objects from the above-the sea world she has never seen ("I've got gizmos and gadgets galore". But while it may look as if "I'm the girl, the girl who has got everything" all these material possessions mean nothing if your soul is sad.
The hopeful 13 have an anxious wait, now. But if they will just take the occasional spoonful of sugar they'll find the wait will be a lark, a spree.
Mary Poppins will be at the Canberra Theatre Centre from March 12-29.