The Department of Musicology hosts a talk by guest scholar Nathan R. Platte (University of Iowa); free and open to the public.

In Pamela Travers’s Mary Poppins novels, Bert is a minor character. In Disney’s 1964 film musical, he is a major one: a friend, mentor, father figure, and jack-of-all trades who sings half of the film’s songs. This presentation accounts for the difference between books and film by showing how Bert’s character became a recurring solution to problems arising in the film’s development. Increasingly, Bert’s songs came to hold the more slippery threads of Travers’s novels, including matters of social standing, affection, and spiritual wonder. Drawing together story treatments, conference notes, scripts, and song drafts, this talk frames Bert as a reconciling presence, whose onscreen assistance of others echoes his role in assuaging disagreement between novelist Travers and the film’s songwriters, Richard and Robert Sherman.