Mary Poppins

This MARY POPPINS takes some getting used to. As played by Ashley Brown, she’s quite aloof and inapproachable with an affect that is seemingly plastic. That’s plastic meaning not real; but it’s also plastic in the poetic sense as in “the plastic hand of god”. Poppins, the one who gives meaning to life, is the story’s deus ex machina.

As directed by Richard Eyre the production works like well oiled machinery with the kind of precision and order the family patron, George Banks so strives for. As played by Daniel Jenkins, he is a stern sovereign and distant dad and even when transformed, by Poppins of course, he registers tenderness without an excess of personality.

In fact, most of the characters in Cameron Mackintosh’s revival of the children’s classic appear slightly cold and inhuman. So, it’s not the sticky sentimental lure that draws us into this heartfelt experience, but the obvious absence of it works like a magnet. In this environment, Rebecca Luker is a delicious counterpoint, creating a generic mom who expresses matronly warmth and fragility.

As for their incorrigible children, it’s Michael who has most of the personality. As portrayed the night I saw the show by Henry Hodges, he is terminally cute. The most captivating performance here, though, is Gavin Lee who plays Bert, Poppins’ ally, a chimney sweep and organ grinder who’s too dirty for children to touch, but who paints the world in fantastic colors. Gavin’s forte is dancing and his lithe form and effervescence are among the production’s showiest highlights, especially when he taps his away around the proscenium arch dancing upside down above the stage only to return all verve and vigor robustly tapping terra firma.

With Matthew Bourne’s choreography every moment of this production is a conceit of fantastic imagery. The dance of the naked marble statues in the park is one. The pastel costumed citizens of London who join them are another. And the toys that come to life to warn the children about the stiff sentence they’ll face for temper tantrums and acting out are magnificent, “even though the look of them is really quite atrocious.”

Of course the story’s moral lies not in how we punish others, but in how we honor them. How we choose the “good person” over the “good idea”. That concept of humanity spills over in the show’s buoyant musical scene in Mrs. Corry’s candy store, where the patrons, Poppins included, burst into hosannas of “supercalifgragilisticexpialidocious”. More than just “a spoonful of sugar”, it happens in “the most delightful way”.

That’s This Week on Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.