MUSICAL THEATRE REVIEW: MARY POPPINS
14 NOV/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
R: 4/5

Pictured: Rachel Wallace, Nicolas Dromard

TORONTO - Some met her first as the unbending heroine in the series of children’s stories by P.L. Travers, but the world didn’t really fall in love with her until she loosened her corsets — figuratively speaking, of course — to lend her name to an Oscar-winning Disney movie musical that convinced us all that MARY POPPINS (as played by Julie Andrews, at least) was simply supercalifragilisticexpealidocious.

Now, almost 80 years after Travers’ stories and half a century after the the movie, books and film come together in an eye-catching stage mashup, written by Julian Fellowes, fusing story elements from both sources and blending many of the musical elements composed for the movie by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman with new compositions from George Stiles and Anthony Drew. And finally, after playing London’s West End, Broadway and diverse locales, MARY POPPINS has landed in Toronto where a touring production opened at the Princess of Wales Saturday, just in time to give a few local Christmas classics a run in the Yuletide family experience department before the wind changes and it decamps for other stages Jan. 8.

And, as produced by Disney and Cameron Mackintosh and directed by Richard Eyre, it is, it must be said, a pretty lavish affair, using an extensive cast and a high-energy staging to tell the story of rambunctious siblings Jane and Michael Banks (played on opening night by Camden Angelis and Dakota Ruiz) and their adventures with the mysterious and magical nanny of title, played by Rachel Wallace.

Initially perilously out of control, the two siblings are slowly tamed as the brisk and no-nonsense Poppins works her stuff and teaches them life lessons through magical adventures that always seem to involve Poppins’ adoring and adorable side-kick, Bert (Nicolas Dromard), a sometimes-chimney sweep whose ability to conjure wonders is surpassed only by Poppins’ own. Under their auspices, toys become animated, kitchens are demolished and rebuilt, statues come to life and Bert goes on a complete tour of a proscenium arch, while, in a darker sub-plot, the children’s parents (played by Laird Mackintosh and Blythe Wilson) struggle to create a safe-haven and keep everything afloat in a world of uncaring Victorian banks and bankers that seems oddly and disturbingly contemporary.

But while Eyre and choreographer Matthew Bourne, in concert with designer Bob Crowley, conspire to keep the stage alive in a constant swirl of colour and movement, layering light, colour and stagecraft to maximum, even dizzying, effect, one might find oneself longing finally for a bit of depth and emotional texture in a story that seems too often to have been written entirely in upper case, using only the exclamation point for punctuation.

In an attempt to evoke the prickly character created by Travers without setting aside the incredible appeal of Andrews’ portrayal, they’ve created a Mary Poppins who moves through the story with all the detachment of an animated robot, smiling, singing and making all the right moves but ultimately as unplugged from the story as a bored supermodel. There’s little chemistry here with Dromard’s chummy Bert and even less with the children she is charged with redeeming and while it’s lovely to see so many Canadian actors — Mackintosh, Dromard and Wilson are joined by Valerie Boyle, Janet MacEwen and a host of others — strut their stuff, it fails to engage on the deepest level.

Because, in the end, it is not any umbrella — or even the enduring magic of tunes like Chim Chim Cher-ee, A Spoonful of Sugar, Step In Time and Feed the Birds, (wherein MacEwen almost steals the show) — that makes MARY POPPINS soar. It’s chemistry, pure and simple — and this high-test production could use a touch of that kind of purity and simplicity.