High-Tech ‘Poppins’ Falls Flat

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The New York Sun

There’s a brief chapter in P.L. Travers’s first “Mary Poppins” book about John and Barbara Banks, the infant twins under the titular nanny’s care. You won’t find them in Disney’s popular 1964 movie version or in the fatally bloated stage musical that reached these shores from London last night, but for one beguiling chapter, Travers depicted their point of view with devastating tenderness.

The twins converse easily with the sunlight and a mischievous starling, then sob uncontrollably upon learning that they’ll lose this uncanny ability around their first birthday; a brief epilogue shows them in their newly uncommunicative state, which in turn reduces the starling to tears.

It’s one of the saddest evocations of lost wonderment in all of children’s literature. A similar lesson — albeit a much longer, louder, and more expensive one — can be found at the Hilton Theatre, where a talented team with an enormous special-effects budget has turned “Mary Poppins”into a flashy parade of joyless delights. Family musicals often aspire to re-create the feeling of being a kid again, but I don’t think the arguably wiser, indisputably sadder John and Barbara are the kids director Richard Eyre had in mind.

Yes, there are some nifty visuals as the no-nonsense Mary (Ashley Brown) guides the two remaining Banks children, Jane and Michael, through a string of surreal capers; for the amount of money this production appears to have cost, there had better be. The upper-floor bedroom of the children’s Victorian home (designed with picture-book whimsy by Bob Crowley) floats up and down from the rafters, Mary and her ever-present umbrella still arrives at 17 Cherry Tree Lane via the wind, and the long-legged Cockney chimney sweep Bert (Gavin Lee) is given a bit of physical derring-do that does Fred Astaire’s gravity-defying “Royal Wedding” dance one better.

But with the exception of one magical sequence involving a half-dozen flying kites, every instant of astonishment comes with a price tag attached. The smaller, seemingly more attainable delights that Mary Poppins generated all the time are nowhere to be found, just big-ticket spectacles achieved with wires and hydraulics.

Bookwriter Julian Fellowes has extended the movie’s emotional arc for the Banks family, particularly Mr. and Mrs. Banks (Daniel Jenkins and Rebecca Luker). Travers’s books are practically designed for bedtime reading. By that, I don’t mean that they’re boring — far from it — but rather that the individual chapters are so self-contained that children are easily sated. This episodic quality presents a problem for any long-form version, but many of Messrs. Eyre and Fellowes’s solutions fizzle.

Much is made of the despotic nanny Mr. Banks had as a boy, and so Mary arbitrarily skips town at intermission to make way for a brief return from the old tyrant (an entertaining Ruth Gottschall). Several new “comic” bits for the exasperated servants (Jane Carr and Mark Price) try the patience. (This from Mr. Fellowes, whose Oscar-winning “Gosford Park” screenplay moved so crisply among the servants as well as the toffs.) Ms. Banks, a suffragette in the movie, is now a former stage actress, the same career that P.L. Travers had pursued before becoming a writer.

And then there is the much-discussed song “Temper, Temper,” in which the children’s toys come to menacing life. A stage “Mary Poppins” had been high on Disney’s to-do list for decades, but complications involving the rights held it up until super-producer Cameron Mackintosh teamed up with Disney. Travers loathed the saccharine streak the film had given her somewhat severe protagonist, and before she died, Mr. Mackintosh (who is billed as co-creator as well as producer) had assured her that the chillier tone of the books would find its way onto the stage.

“Temper, Temper” is the result of this vow, and while I would hardly advocate breaking one’s promise to a beloved author, I’m not convinced that closing Act I with a protracted, tepid song (which isn’t even that scary) is the best way to honor her memory. It doesn’t help that the two child actors are ill served by Mr. Eyre, who has pushed them into broad, cutesy line readings and blocked them down to the last millimeter. Katherine Leigh Doherty and Matthew Gumley each sang well at a recent preview, but the sheer falsity of their delivery stood in the way of any emotional connection with them or their strained family arrangement.

That one song excepted, George Stiles and Anthony Drewe’s new material melds comfortably with the 1964 Richard M. Sherman-Robert B. Sherman film score, including the addition of some sharp new lyrics to the original songs. And if none of the new songs reach the heights of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” or “Feed the Birds” – let alone the marvelous lullaby “Stay Awake,” which is unconscionably absent — they propel the drama along effectively. “Being Mrs. Banks” fits Ms. Luker’s magnificent soprano like a lace glove, and the good-nanny-bad-nanny duet “Brimstone and Treacle” provides Ms. Brown and Ms. Gottschall with some enjoyable vocal fireworks.

The film’s boisterous “Step in Time” number, with its soot-covered chimney sweeps cavorting all over the roofs of London, would remain a highlight even without the aforementioned stage effect added for Bert. This is the one dance sequence in which choreographer/co-director Matthew Bourne, the visionary behind such works as the 1998 Broadway “Swan Lake,” raises his ambitions beyond the typical Broadway fare and launches into visual poetry. (Mr. Crowley’s sets attain that level of poetry here and throughout “Mary Poppins,” alternately replicating and reimagining Mary Shepard’s iconic illustrations.)

The spindly Mr. Lee, a carryover from the London production, doesn’t do much with the role of Bert beyond what Dick Van Dyke did in the film, but his endless supply of high-kicking effervescence is infectious. And by conveying the delight of Mary’s company so persuasively, he makes it easier for Ms. Brown to stay true to the books’ more severe vision of Mary. While her crisp soprano fares well with the ballads — her “Feed the Birds” is particularly strong — Ms. Brown fails to deliver the vital twinkle that would turn Mary from facilitator to active participant in Jane and Michael’s adventures.

Speaking of “Feed the Birds,” here’s how Travers described the array of birds clustered around the bedraggled Bird Woman as she sells her bread crumbs:

There were fussy and chatty grey doves like Grandmothers; and brown, rough-voiced pigeons like Uncles; and greeny, cackling, no-I’ve-no-money-today pigeons like Fathers. And the silly, anxious, soft blue doves were like Mothers. That’s what Jane and Michael thought, anyway.

Messrs. Eyre and Crowley opt instead for a sumptuous video projection of birds flying around St. Paul’s Cathedral. The image could have come directly from an advertisement for a top-of-the-line high-definition television. The comparison speaks volumes.

Open run (214 W. 42nd St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-307-4747).


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