Mary Poppins ‘perfectly perfect’
Sung stories are big time and the idea of music-driven storytelling has been around for generations. On Saturday night, though, Hamilton Operatic set a new level of presentation, despite being forced to use the much maligned – and rightfully so – Claudelands Arena, as it is the only amphitheatre large enough to mount this show successfully.
Director David Sidwell used the arena space to set up a temporary proscenium stage where the action on stage could be focused and defined. He then had John Harding design a mobile set which moves like magic and actively encourages the cast to perform some of the most complicated, stage-filling, and difficult choreography while also focusing faultlessly in scenes where only one or two characters may be performing.
It was also a traditional set-up with a live orchestra pit, something the electronic whizzkids have tended to delete from their toolboxes. The pit is wonderful for audience interest, it happens to separate the stage action from the audience in a way which hugely advantages the suspension of disbelief and, of singular importance, it gives the audience a direct line between ear and instrument. That connection is an experience like no other. What a tragedy that the murderous acoustics of the arena required rock performance enhancement.
It is a practice which takes all the individual instrumental frequencies which give the music its real life and beauty, and offers in return perfectly flattened perfect pitch. Combine that with rock concert volume, and an ongoing difficulty in locating the source of sung solo sound or dialogue, and the wonderfully moving sentiment of the Mary Poppins narrative gives way to mere spectacle.
It is an ongoing problem, and Saturday night’s performance was the more remarkable for the quality of acting and of the music. Voices like the magnificent baritone from Scot Hall as George Banks and the perfectly cast and superbly delivering soprano of his stage wife, Winifred, played by Jayne Tankersley, and their two stage children, Ava Downey as Jane, and Ollie Neil as her young brother Michael, quite magically bound the show together.
This version of the Broadway production is sharper, more intensely honest about human nature, more genuine than the rather saccharine original, and it benefits from it. But in the end, dear reader, the magic was in the choreography.
Sonja McGirr-Garrett had the cast, some trained dancers, other trained actors, and others amateurs in the show for sheer love of theatre, moving on stage in the kaleidoscopic patterns which usually come across as a chaotic jumble. McGirr-Garrett produced a string of visual wonders and captivating moments. From the early trio in, I think, Practically
Perfect, where they were actually perfect, to dance sequences culminating in the extraordinary
Playing the Game, where flexibly agile dolls kept moving from chaos to sheer beauty of form and back again, the choreography was the most rewarding, the most imaginatively breathtaking, and the most professionally pure I have observed on a Hamilton stage.
I have run out of honest adjectives. Just go and see it.