There must be an East wind blowing in Los Angeles. Mary Poppins has blown into town and can be seen nightly on stage at the Ahmanson Theatre. I refer, of course, to the musical version of P. L. Travers' popular children’s stories. Travers wrote a total of eight books about Mary Poppins, who she presents as a vain, acerbic, no-nonsense but magical nanny who comes to work at the Banks household (which has lost a succession of nannies) because the children misbehaved so. Mary Poppins puts all that right through magic, with which she makes the ordinary seem wonderful and chores a matter of a wave of her hand.
Along came Disney which in 1964 made a musical out of the stories and a movie starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke with songs by the Sherman Brothers. Flash forward some twenty years and Disney has transformed the stories again into a live musical, but not without extensive rewrites and a bunch of new songs. Travers explicitly stated her displeasure over the movie and stipulated in her will that no American would ever get his or her hands on the property. Over the years people have wondered why there hadn’t been a stage version. That's why.
What Disney has done is hire a British director (Richard Eyre of the National Theatre in London), a famous British choreographer (Matthew Bourne), a British producer (Cameron Mackintosh), sets and costumes by a British designer (Bob Crowley), and a new set of British composers (George Stiles and Anthony Drewe). The result is, well, British, though Disney has still managed to soften Mary’s character to make her cuddlier. The result is a longish evening, because you are hearing two scores, the insipid Sherman Brothers songs (a must because they are so well known), and all that new material. But the show is still a triumph.
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