Mary Poppins

SWEEPING THE NATION Brown and Lee enjoy a rooftop evening.

Photo: Joan Marcus

A few years ago, when one of my best friends moved to New York, her first job was tending bar at Mary Poppins at the New Amsterdam Theatre (she’d just finished her second master’s). Ever the pragmatist, she observed that when fathers would order their kids $7 sodas in perky, Poppins-emblazoned sippy cups, they’d inevitably order themselves a $15 martini, which, per company regulation, was also served in said sippy cup. I’ve always loved this Disney Theatricals metaphor of limitless interpretations—a show so warm and fuzzy it makes you crave a stiff cocktail, the fleecing of kiddie-entertainment consumers via the bar, a grown man’s pain camouflaged in colorful plastic—as this example’s tweetlike brevity somehow efficiently contains everything we need to know about the new Broadway. Still, while Patrick Fitzgerald could probably bring a decent case against the producers for charging families a top price of $90 per seat in the thick of a recession, the lavish, sensational stage version of Mary Poppins is a charming socialist’s dilemma: exorbitantly priced theater that’s worth every damn penny.

The 1964 film version of P.L. Travers’s books, about the no-nonsense/all-whimsy nanny who brightens up a dreary London family of four, boasts so many cherished standards it stands alongside golden-era Broadway gems. Naturally, the staging of these songs is the main event. (The scenes can drag, but what musical can’t say the same?) Though Eyre was a little stymied in how to re-create the hand-animated/live-action signature, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” just about every other eye-shattering number in this outsize, psychedelic fairy tale is a number. In particular, the second-act tap-dancing blowout “Step in Time” features a surprise so brilliant it’s strange it hasn’t already eclipsed Phantom’s crashing chandelier and Wicked’s significantly less cool flying witch in pop-theater mythology.

As usual, Disney would prefer the stage technology do the work rather than the actors—actors, after all, run the dangerous risk of changing from night to night—but Poppins’ female performers still manage to transcend the often extraneous stage-CGI. (I loved both sinister Ellen Harvey as a bad-cop nanny and Valerie Boyle as a fusty cook, while prim, golden-throated Brown makes hay of the title role.) If you can’t afford it right now, the words of Disney trickster-god Jiminy Cricket cascade to mind: Let your conscience be your guide.

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