TheatreAddict.com - Bakersfield Drama Blog

I haven't posted anything since December and the site going active is still a few months away, so I thought I would post a review of Mary Poppins on stage in London. The movie was one of my favorite fantasy experiences as a child and I still love it, though now I enjoy it on the special edition DVD. It sounds like the stage show is really amazing, oh how I would love to see a huge dance number of "Step in Time"! Here is the article.


Mary Poppins

Prince Edward, London

Lyn Gardner
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian


l-r): Ross McCormack as Michael Banks, Scarlett Strallen as Mary Poppins, Lydia Bannister as Jane Banks. Photographer: Alastair Muir.

The London stage is heaped with the corpses of classic family musicals that have failed to make the transition from screen to stage, but, unlike the dull Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, this version of PL Travers' story about Edwardian supernanny Mary Poppins really does fly - at the end, right over the auditorium, much to the gasps and delight of the audience. In Richard Eyre's newly recast production, there are plenty of such entertaining sleight of hand moments, which have you believing in magic from the second Mary spirits a piece of cloth out of her carpet bag and it turns into a bed.

Bob Crowley's astonishing designs - creating a real sense of the majesty of Edwardian London, as well as offering up 17 Cherry Tree Lane as a gigantic, gorgeous doll's house - are doing a lot of the hard work here, and Matthew Bourne's choreography sweeps all before it. This is particularly true in the exuberant Step in Time, a number so irresistibly chirpy that it makes you contemplate signing up immediately for tap-dancing lessons. But this is a show with considerable emotional depth, too. The starchy Mary Poppins may believe that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but the advantage of Julian Fellowes' clever and satisfying new adaptation is that it takes the bones but not the saccharine from the 1964 Disney screenplay and returns to PL Travers' original novel for its inspiration.

The result is less a jolly jape than a story about how upbringing can scar, and an intimate portrait of a marriage and family under huge stress because of an emotionally semi-detached father. As George Banks, the investment banker who can only express his love for his family by providing for them, and who dissolves when he is suspended without pay from the bank for making a doubtful business decision, Aden Gillett may not sing outstandingly, but he movingly suggests all the repressed pain of a man who will not allow himself to feel. This is Peter Pan grown up and foundering. In Being Mrs Banks, one of several excellent new songs provided by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, Eliza Lumley's Winifred Banks expresses all the wistfulness of a woman whose marriage has caught a chill.

The reality extends to the children, who are not cute poppets but such damaged, obnoxious brats that our very own governmental Mary Poppins, Tony Blair, would undoubtedly be signing up the entire Banks family for his new parenting academy. Gavin Lee is an engaging Bert, Rosemary Ashe seizes her chance as the dragon nanny who is given a taste of her own brimstone and treacle, and, in the title role, Scarlett Strallen's mixture of primness and twinkle sums up the enduring place of nanny in the English middle class.

· Booking to October 28. Box office: 020-7447 5400

-Posted from The Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Article online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/story/0,,1685267,00.html