Half-baked story aside, ‘Mary Poppins’ serves up everything you could want in a mega-budget family musical: memorable songs, dazzling visuals and a nostalgic ideal of a London that never existed. It’s supercalifragelistically good fun to visit for an hour or three.
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This feel-good extravaganza defies both logic and pessimism. Maybe that’s what we need right now.
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Zizi Strallen (who played the role on tour in 2015) might have stepped from a picture-book. She is, to cite one of the better songs of the blandish cache by Stiles and Drewe (augmenting the bankable Sherman Brothers classics), “practically perfect in every way”.
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As an alternative to panto, the production makes a perfectly acceptable family outing. As a musical, it doesn’t quite take flight.
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The iconic musical makes a welcome return to the West End...Although it often conjures the movie, the stage show undoubtedly has its own tart tone.
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All contribute to a lavish if somewhat muddled and inescapably old-fashioned revival – sure to succeed commercially via the nostalgic power of Poppins, but, unlike its titular nanny, never quite taking flight.
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But for nearly three hours, at least, you can park some of those worries at the door, and simply bask in the gentle familiarity and delightful uplift of this story and the spit-spot production it has been given...
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Travers scholars may still miss the darkness of the books, but for the rest of us the show is an unassailable treat and Eyre’s production has acquired the heart to go with its art.
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