Patti Newton has two Berts on stage with her every night as she plays the Bird Woman in Disney and Cameron Mackintosh’s musical Mary Poppins — the show’s lovable cockney chimney sweep and the memory of her beloved husband, Bert Newton.
“I do take Bert on stage with me every night and I have a couple of things that I do before I go on, which are very, very much him,” she says.
“I bless myself before I go on, and I do a fist bump to any of the crew that’s around. They all know someone’s got to be there to do it for me.”
Newton joined the musical ahead of its Brisbane season, a year to the month after her husband the legendary Australian entertainer’s death, accepting the surprising invitation to audition as a way to survive the struggle of his absence.
“I always felt that Bert sent this role to me to get me through, and I do think that’s exactly what it’s done,” Newton says.
“I think he would probably have thought ‘Hang on, there’s another Bert in it, she won’t have lost me’. It was funny at rehearsals because we’d be rehearsing the scenes, and they would say, ‘Now, you stand there, and then Bert will come over to pick you up and he will grab you by the arm and he’ll take you off’. I used to think, ‘Oh, it feels like Bert’s here again’.
“It’s been lovely and Jack (Chambers), the young man who plays Bert, is a delight. He’s such a caring, talented young man that I couldn’t have wished for another. If I had to have another Bert, I’m glad it’s him. I really think this was meant to happen.”
Newton “feeds the birds” alongside Chambers and Stefanie Jones, playing the show’s title character, seeing her own role as more of a cameo, which is exactly the way she likes it.
However, she admits she has been challenged by the musical’s encore routine of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
“I was having trouble sort of remembering all the movements and when I got them, the choreographer said, ‘Now, you have to say all the letters at the same time’, and I said ‘I can’t do two things at once, I can only do one’,” she laughs.
“I know a few of them, but I mime a few of them as well.”
With great memories of attending Telethon in Perth with her husband, Newton is looking forward to seeing more of the city after the show’s opening night on September 13, when her daughter Lauren and six grandchildren visit to see the musical and spend time with “Nan”.
“My grandchildren have seen it several times. When they come to Perth they’ll have been to almost every State in Australia, so I sort of feel that in that alone, it’s been a wonderful experience for the children there,” she says.
“The youngest has just turned three and the eldest is 15, so it’s a big variety, but they all love the show and they all have a different part that they love the most.
“It’s a wonderful show for people to take their grandchildren or their children to, particularly if they’ve never seen a musical before, because this one really gives them an idea of what life is like in the theatre.
“I’ve never had any regrets and one of the things that we always used to say together is: ‘Not everybody has done something that they’ve loved for all of their life like Bert and I did.’ I think that makes life pretty happy.”