Spoonfuls of showbiz sugar help give the audience a night to remember
Musicals
Mary Poppins
Bristol Hippodrome
Ithink it was at the point when Matt Lee’s chimney-sweep Bert casually sauntered up one side of the Bristol Hippodrome’s proscenium arch and then perilously tap-danced upside down right over the orchestra pit that I surrendered. “OK, Mary Poppins – you win,” I decided.
For sheer determination to give audiences a night to remember, this stage musical takes some beating. Producer Cameron Mackintosh is theatreland’s razzmatazz retort to the age of austerity. With the precious rights to PL Travers’s cherished books and working with Disney, who made the adored 1964 film, he honours the material with a mixture of fastidiousness and indulgence that would put an approving smile on the face of its enigmatic super-nanny heroine.
Mechanically poised and immaculately dressed, Zizi Strallen, 25, follows in her eldest sister Scarlett’s footsteps, taking the lead in this fresh tour – now visiting the venue where the show started out in 2004 before it went to the West End. She’s practically perfect in every way – albeit perhaps a little too much the beaming stage-school auditionee. The show itself wouldn’t look out of place on Shaftesbury Avenue were she to click her fingers and transport it there tomorrow.
It boasts a company of 31 who hoof it up with the stamina of Aintree thoroughbreds. It has ingenious designs (No 17 Cherry Tree Lane is conceived by Bob Crowley as a picture-book doll’s house, rife with lovingly detailed locations). And it has lots of magical effects, culminating in the ooh-ahh sight of Poppins holding her unfolded umbrella aloft and ascending over the heads of the audience right up to the gods.
There’s no disguising the fact that, even with the input of Julian Fellowes on the book, nuanced direction (by Richard Eyre, on tour enforced by James Powell) and songs from Stiles and Drewe to supplement the famous tunes the Sherman Brothers cooked up for the film, this musical isn’t up there with the greats. It lacks psychological complexity, rich variety and intensity, even though it does nicely bring out the anxieties facing a middle-class household headed by an emotionally stunted banker who learns that you short-change your family of attention at your cost.
The medicinal domestic themes are plied with enough spoonfuls of showbiz sugar to trigger diabetes. But that’s as it should be. Turning drab days into colourful riots, the “jolly holiday with Mary” is available to all. With such supercalifragilisticexpialidocious winter-escapism on Bristol’s doorstep, the city can wear its Poppins with pride.