Blogway Baby is thrilled to announce our new London Theatre Correspondent, Norm Seli! A longtime theater connoisseur and Blogway Baby reader, Norm will be giving us the lowdown on the theater scene "across the pond".

Norm's first installment follows:

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REVIEW: Mary Poppins

We saw Mary Poppins H row, just off center. Great seats! The cast was great. I was thinking that we must either hurry up or slow down bringing this show to Toronto. I am afraid that Myrna is too old for Jane Banks by the time comes to us...so we should put it off a few years so that Myrna can be Mary!

The staging was fantastic. The use of fading scrims gave everything a storybook quality coming in and out of scenes. The house at Cherry Tree lane was set up beautifully, with the upper floor nursery and the roof top being lowered as needed. The bank was well presented and left me feeling very, very small...

Mary Poppins was very clearly a Julie Andrews Merry Poppins and had the pipes and pluck to pull it off. She was captivating and practically perfect in every way. Mrs. Banks was very much Glynnis Johns, but with less to do. She was very good and comes into her own as a character at the end... but I did so miss "Sister Suffragette".

The children were very good: Lovable at times, but unruly and unkind at others. Not as cute as the movie, which was a good thing. When Jane and Michael dismiss the woman feeding the birds at St. Paul's as a "smelly old bag of rags" you just want to smack them! "Feed the Birds" is important to the show because it is one of the moments where Michael takes steps not to follow in his father's footsteps. Jane, wonderfully, remains untouched by the old lady.

This is a show about Mr. Banks -- although he does not dominate the script or the stage time. But as the story unfolds we see his life and the emptiness of it...we see his determination to give this life to his children, even as he feels the emptiness. We see his desire to be human in tension with his need to do a good job. Better than the movie, we get to meet his former nanny and come to understand what happened to him to make him so...and we see his redemption as he discovers his lost child and comes to follow his own children.

But what of Burt?

Burt is narrator, classical chorus, friend to the children and Mary Poppins confidant. He gets wonderful songs, but does not dominate as Dick Van Dyke does in the movie. He's second star, no doubt, but not as big a star as Dick was in the movie. He doesn't need to be.

Matthew Bourne, I mentioned before, did the choreography and is "co-director". He is what elevates this show from being a wonderful Saturday afternoon with the kids to being an excellent musical! There is a dance in the park -- "It's a Jolly Holiday with Mary". Sure, you might miss the penguins from the movie, but instead the grey statues come to life and dance this ballet that is at times almost spooky/scary...and then other times exciting and inviting. It captured the feel of the show perfectly. Like a good English children's story of old, this story can be scary. The dance in the nursery when the toys come to life and threatened to attack the children as they have been attacked in fits of temper is down right frightening. The evil nanny Miss Andrews with her brimstone and treacle is the thing from which nightmares are made. All of that is reflected in the park ballet (not explicitly of course, but the feeling is there...) but the park ballet also has the joy of discovery and childhood evident: Playfulness and laughter. It was just damn good...

But "Step In Time" takes the cake. Better than the movie -- and they did it live! Burt tape dances up the wall and taps upside down for a time.... even with wires, that's no mean feat! It took my breath away...

What didn't I like?

As much as I loved the way that they sang and presented "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", I didn't get the Word Woman. A large black African woman with a big voice and special insight into the world...when we have nothing left to say, she gives us, finds for us, give us words. I just don't know what she was doing there. I thought that Rafiki had come over from The Lion King by mistake. Don't get me wrong -- she can sing and she was wonderful. But the orange, brown, yellow and black blowing robes was a jarring contrast with the Victorian England of the rest of the show. Don't get rid of her, but maybe bring her in earlier, let me see her in the crowd or the park...make her a part of the surroundings earlier and maybe then she won't be so "out of place".

Also, as long as I'm being picky -- give the house staff more to do. Give 'em some more business. I know that we'll need a four-hour show, but they were so good and promising that we should have seen more of them.

In short: great performances and brilliant choreography and staging; enough of the movie to bring back good memories, but different enough and truer to the book to be more than nostalgia.

Okay enough about Mary Poppins...except that I would see it again in a second and I still see her flying into the audience just as I close my eyes to sleep...

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