An enthusiastic Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins: The Broadway Musical Theatre: Citadel and Theatre Calgary Directed by: Michael Shamata Starring: Blythe Wilson, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Vincent Gale, Kate Ryan, Zasha Rabie, Jack Forestier, Susan Gilmour, Michelle Fisk Running: through April 20 Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com
“None of your theatrics!” snaps a tetchy authoritarian banker at his struggling wife in the opening moments of Mary Poppins.
Good luck with that, Mr. Banks — you’re in a Broadway musical with a joint Disney/Cameron Mackintosh pedigree. And your constricted Edwardian regime at 17 Cherry Tree Lane is about to be blown up by a flying nanny with an umbrella and a magical carpet bag — not to mention friends in chimney-top places who can dance, and songs that drill themselves permanently into even the most resistant mental granite.
Mr. Banks and his frosty domestic disaffection don’t stand a chance against the arsenal of theatrical resources at the disposal of the Citadel/ Theatre Calgary co-production directed by Michael Shamata. And the updraft that brings a supernanny interventionist to the rescue blew through the packed opening night house Thursday, creating a veritable gust of collective enthusiasm for the happy, and tuneful, outcome of a dysfunctional family restored to harmony.
Before that, though, a wellacted, handsomely dressed, musically expert production, with its share of heart-lifting comic highlights, seems to dole out its numbers in a deliberate, not to say cumbersome, way that you start to notice after a while. This Mary Poppins is a curiously deliberate affair for all its “theatrics,” particularly slow-moving in Act I. Or is it that the “theatrics” advertise themselves a little too relentlessly?
The parent age of the crowdpleaser musical originally brought to the stage by the star Brit director Richard Eyre is a conflicted one: P.L. Travers’s dark, tart-tongued kids’ series of books from the 1930s, and the 1964 Julie Andrews movie, Disney fied with more than a spoonful of sugar. The movie provides most of the songs, by the Sherman brothers Richard and Robert, who, as reported in a 2006 New Yorker piece, famously joked back at Walt’s question “do you boys actually know what a nanny is?” with “sure! a goat!”
The book, created by Julian Fellowes (of Downton Abbey fame), fashions a play about “saving Mr. Banks,” as the recent movie has it, from his own archaic views and his wife’s compliance.
Vincent Gale and Kate Ryan are excellent. The former, in a rare musical theatre role, reinvents the more usual pompous blusterer of the banker with a prematurely desiccated workaholic, a distracted and irascible isolationist. His reclamation, when it comes, via a kite, is a touching thing. The latter gives us a character who is addled by anxiety, and the feeling of perpetually falling short. Gale and Ryan bring real dramatic heft to songs like Mr. Banks’s Good For Nothing and Mrs. Banks’s generically wistful Being Mrs. Banks.
Director Shamata has the considerable advantage of impressively talented, engaging kids. As Jane and Michael Banks, Zasha Rabie and Jack Forestier go well beyond the adorability quotient (in which they rate high) into the musical theatre stratum where real singer/actors live. Although the early scenes don’t give the pair much chance to be the snotty brats of the premise, the two are alert and attentive to what’s happening around them, in a way that ups the ante in wonder. As for their mysterious new nanny, impervious to the rules of probability, the appealing Blythe Wilson has the kind of prim and twinkly charm that places her well within the Julie Andrews tradition — and she also has that kind of crystalline voice. She beams and bustles, but something of the English starch seems missing, particularly in speech and accent. When Mary Poppins is sweet rather than formidable, she’s fun, but some of her surprises go AWL.
Her best friend Bert, the Cockney chimney sweep, introduces to the Citadel mainstage an actor of startling gifts, the long-limbed and delightful Andrew MacDonald-Smith. The dance number he leads, the outrageously contagious Step in Time (choreographer: Lisa Stevens), is a highlight. Susan Gilmour is a hoot as the nanny from hell, in a double turn as the Bird Woman. And I loved Michelle Fisk as the bristly Mrs. Brill, the much-put-upon cook with the burning sense of grievance.
In look and sound, Mary Poppins operates at a high level, thanks to Gillian Gallow’s lovely period costumes, Michael Walton’s lighting, and the expert musical direction from Don Horsburgh. The staging, though, has variable success, in the musical’s admittedly insistent alternation of interiors and exteriors. The pieces of Cory Sincennes’s design are judicious enough — trees, rooftops, wrought-iron fences, bank pillars — but they get yanked up and down, on and off, in a series that grows relentless, even with a revolving stage.
The rhythm of a piece with a rhythmically transcendent number like Step in Time is, in the end, uninspired. Funny how theatrical magic can get bogged down in the technical requirements. It takes sorcery, but sometimes, as Mary Poppins herself might have said, less is more.