Marc and Dee Dee: The Choreographers You Never Knew
When Walt Disney began production on Mary Poppins (1964) in the early 1960s, he intended from the very beginning it would be a musical. Disney gave extra attention to each detail of the film, including hiring Julie Andrews to play the title role, Robert Stevenson to direct, Bill Walsh to co-produce, and Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman to write the music. Finding choreographers to stage the musical numbers, however, was a challenge for Walt, although he hired Tom Mahoney to choreograph Babes in Toyland (1961) as well as various episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-1956) and The Magical World of Disney (1954-1991), Mahoney, at this point, wasn’t available as he was committed to choreographing Bikini Beach (1964), which starred fellow Mouseketeers Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
Disney relied on “Poppins,” actor Dick Van Dyke to see if he knew any choreographers, and Van Dyke recommended a husband and wife team, Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood, with whom he had worked with on The Andy Williams Show (1962-1963). Prior to television, they had also choreographed the original production of the Broadway musical Do-Re-Mi, which has nothing to do with the song from The Sound of Music (1965). Although both husband and wife had made dancing credits on television and on Broadway, neither had ever choreographed a motion picture but it didn’t stop at Disney.
In addition to choreographing all the dance numbers in the film, (from “Jolly Holliday,” to “Step in Time,”) both Breaux and Wood made other unique contributions to the film. Wood suggested that during the Jolly Holiday sequence, Mary Poppins’ umbrella and Bert’s cane, do an animatronic dance of their own. She originally thought that that would be impossible, though she was later told by someone “Never say that anything at Disney is impossible!” Breaux also provided the singing voice of the cow in the Jolly Holiday sequence. When they heard the Sherman brothers’ score, they both knew they were a part of something special, as did everyone else who was involved with the movie.
Helping “Poppins,” become the blockbuster that it became, Breaux and Wood, were then hired to choreograph “The Sound of Music,” which reunited them with Julie Andrews and “Poppins,” conductor Irwin Kostal. In 1967, they were re-hired by Walt Disney to stage the musical numbers for The Happiest Millionaire, which ignited the film career of Lesley Ann Warren, and would also be the last live-action movie that Walt Disney would supervise. (He passed away during the film’s production.) Their next film after that was MGM’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), which also featured Irwin Kostal’s conducting, another score written by the Shermans, and was also a reunion for the two of them with Dick Van Dyke.
Although their marriage would unfortunately end in divorce, they remained close and also choreographed movies such as United Artists’ Huckleberry Finn (1974), and Universal’s The Slipper and the Rose (1976), both of which also featured songs by the Shermans. In the later 1970s, Marc Breaux had some health issues and went to work as a film editor for Sunset Gower Studios until his retirement in the mid-1990s. Wood choreographed for a while longer and is also known for having choreographed the Touchstone Pictures film, Beaches (1988), which starred Bette Midler, as well as another episode of “Magical World of Disney.” She retired to Mesa, Arizona where she currently lives—and while her former husband remained in Los Angeles, he later rejoined her, where he sadly passed away on November 19th, 2013. Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood’s legacy of dance will live on: for most of us it will be in beloved favorites primarily in “Poppins,” “Sound of Music,” and “Chitty Chitty.”
No comments:
Post a Comment