Our Most recent “Petula Adventure”!

I am going to start at the end, rather than at the beginning –I do not mean at the real end because Petula Clark is still amazing –actually, she is about to release her auto-biography in October 2025. But I refer to the last time my husband and I saw Petula perform. It was November of 2019 in London where she had several weeks earlier begun her role as the Bird Woman in Mary Poppins!

A week in London is a treasure in itself in my view. Over the years we have had the fortune of visiting the city on quite a few occasions –most times, in one way or another connected to our discovery of the joy of travelling to see Petula perform and planning our vacations around those performances. We have dubbed them our “Petula adventures”.

 This last one we almost missed because we had thought it might be nicer to visit London in the spring –the following spring, as in 2020!! We, of course, had no way of knowing then what the spring of 2020 had in store for us, but not willing to chance that Petula’s run in Mary Poppins might not continue into the spring, we set off for London in the middle of November.

There’s nothing quite like the buzz of London’s West End. I love the sense of excitement as people flock to the theatre. My first taste of that magic was way back in the summer of 1987, when I was lucky enough to see Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, and Chess in the early days of their historic runs. Every single time I return, I’m filled with that same initial wonder and thrill, a feeling that never fades.

My husband and I had been Petula Clark fans since the early days of our courting and we loved seeing her in concert more times and in more places than we could count, but we only saw her perform in two musical theatre shows –both in London, –in 1996 in Sunset Boulevard and in 2019 in Mary Poppins!! Although she had the starring role in the former , seeing her as the Bird Woman in Mary Poppins was every bit as wondrous. Her ability to singularly engage an audience has certainly not waned over the years. “Feed the Birds”, her only solo in the show was impeccable and spell-binding, and the audience responded so  enthusiastically. 

We saw Mary Poppins twice, first on Saturday evening Nov.16 and again on Monday  evening Nov.18. For the Monday night we had managed to score some premium Stall seats. Of course, there was a caveat, that night the cast of Mary Poppins, including Petula, were attending the Royal Variety Performance  before the scheduled show time. We wondered if Petula would perform at the theatre after already performing  in the presence of royalty. It would have been perfectly understandable had she skipped the theatre performance. But to our joy—she did both!!  Not only that she took time after the show at the stage door to meet fans and we had the chance talk with her about her performance, about our visit to London and our previous encounters. It is quite remarkable how kind Petula always is to her fans,  probably part of  the reason for the loyalty and  longevity of her fan base.

Of course, as much as the highlight of our trip was our Petula encounter, there is no denying that “London is London”, and there was so much more during that trip, and so many great shows– a chance to see Hamilton, the Tina the Musical and The Play that Goes Wrong–a tour of Kensington Palace and the Winston Churchill War Room—all of it because in 1965 Petula Clark sang “Downtown” and we were hooked!!