Practically perfect
We just got back from our annual pre-Christmas weekend in New York City. I'm tired, but happy, and ready to blog again.
The highlight of the weekend was taking our daughters to see the very enjoyable Broadway stage version of "Mary Poppins," the 1964 film that starred Julie Andrews and Dick VanDyke. Ashley Brown did well in the eponymous role, but Gavin Lee excelled in the role of Bert, the chimney sweep. The original songs by Robert and Richard Sherman are supplemented by several new compositions by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. The special effects are amazing, notably when Lee tap dances upside down across the proscenium arch of the stage. There wasn't an empty seat in the house, and I see from the ad in today's New York Times that weekends are sold out, or nearly so, through March. Try StubHub.com. That's where I got my tickets.
Now if you thought you'd escape politics in this post, you're wrong. Both the 1964 film and the 2006 Broadway production were/are creatures of their time. The film, no matter how you remember it, was actually quite subversive, suffused with a mid-1960s ethos of rebellion against conformity and rules. Consider Mr. and Mrs. Banks, the couple whose efforts to find and keep a suitable nanny for their unruly children, Jane and Michael, lead to the magical arrival of supernanny Mary Poppins.
In the 1964 film, George Banks is a stuffy banker who proclaims himself the lord and master of his house, wife and children. He sings that, "a British bank, is run with precision. A British home, requires nothing less. Tradition, discipline and rules, must be the tools..." (That song is mostly gone from the new production, save for a few bars near the end.) In addition to trying to tame his unruly children, he is vexed by a wife who is an active suffragette, trying to win women the right to vote. Mary Poppins and Bert introduce the children to a different world, one where rules and conformity are far less important than being a creative free spirit. They visit their father at the bank, where Michael inadvertently triggers a run on the bank by complaining that they won't let him see his money.
In the 2006 Broadway production, George Banks seems more like an over-stressed Yuppie trying to find a nanny with a Green Card than a striver seeking to maintain the rigid social standards and rules of Edwardian England. Mrs. Banks is a former actress, not a suffragette. The conflict with her husband is over his refusal to allow her to continue to work on the stage. When the Banks children visit George at the bank, it seems more like Take Your Children To Work Day than an opportunity for rebellious non-conformity. Michael doesn't cause a ruckus. The bank threatens to fire George for turning down an Enron-like financing deal that another bank snaps up. His career is saved not, as in the film, because George repeats a dumb joke he heard from Jane and Michael that causes the stuffy bank chairman to die laughing, but because the deal implodes for the other bank. The non-conformity is there, but it's not the subversive be-all and end-all it is in the film. It becomes just another lifestyle, like the Apple guy versus the Windows guy.
I suppose one can argue that because the hippies and other rebels of the 1960s essentially won, and non-conformity is the new norm, some other approach had to be taken. Despite its muddled message, "Mary Poppins" on Broadway is well worth your time and money. The wonderful songs, especially "Feed the Birds" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," and the great dance routines make for an evening that will entrance even the most stuffy non-conformist.