Skip to main content

Mary Poppins

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Five stars

When Mary Poppins soars over the heads of the audience at the end of Richard Eyre and Matthew Bourne's musical staging of P.L. Travers' stories, the strings may be visible beyond the brolley, but the New Age mantra of 'Anything can happen if you want it to' uttered by this most radical of nannies makes perfect sense. As soon as Zizi Strallen's Mary beamed down into the upmarket town house where the nanny-baiting Banks children, Michael and Jane, were rebelling against the regimented routines implemented by their banker father George and ex actress mother Winifred, after all, an entire culture of hand-me-down repression was doomed. .

Once Mary hooks up with chimney sweeping street artist Bert, by way of a series of wonderful set-pieces led by Bourne's choreography, the park becomes a psychedelic wonderland where statues come to life and a sweetshop more resembles an underground shebeen. This exposes Michael and Jane to a magical state of play, while even George finds his buttoned-up company man persona honed in a Kafkaesque mausoleum give way to outbursts of ethical capitalism once he falls under Mary's spell and rediscovers his child within.

Everything about this co-production between the Disney organisation and the show's co-creator Cameron Mackintosh is a marvel. Julian Fellowes' cheekily counter-cultural book is delivered with the same unfettered gusto as Richard M and Robert B Sherman's original songs, accompanied by new material by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. Strallen invests Mary with a winking coquettishness, while Matt Lee as Bert leads massed constructivist chimney sweeps across the rooftops with fearless glee in a show that relishes in the unabashed transcendent power of play.

The Herald, May 3rd 2016
 

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more