Mary Poppins

I don’t like musicals. Songs just drag out something that can be explained in a couple of sentences and end up making movies unnecessarily long. Take the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for example. A movie about an inventor trying to make a flying car ends up being 2.5hr long and you feel like you’re tripping on acid as it slowly stops making sense.



Despite this, I’m still a sucker for the classics and when I was younger, I watched the great hits like The Sound of Music and Grease. So when my wife bought tickets to see the stage show, Mary Poppins, I didn’t argue. I was a little baffled that they had decided to turn the musical, Mary Poppins, into… well… a musical, but I was keen to go.



So last night we headed into QPAC to see the show. I debated what to wear for a while at home and eventually concluded that a trip to the theatre warranted long pants and shoes despite the hot and humid weather. On our arrival, I had immediate remorse cause I’m pretty sure that if a kid can rock up in a full Spiderman costume, I could have worn shorts.



So what is Mary Poppins the musical like when compared to the original Mary Poppins musical? Funnily enough, they are pretty much the same. The story follows the original plot and I guess it is testament to the original movie. It brought back many memories of watching the poorly coloured original movie and answered some age old questions like how to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

What was impressive was the extremely elaborate stage and backdrop designs and how they were flawlessly choreographed in time with the movement on the stage. I have a better appreciation of the time and costs that go into setting up such a show and understand why shows can run for months on end before moving on… I mean, who would want to attempt packing up all that stuff and transporting it interstate!!??



So was it worthy of a standing ovation? Put it this way… I stayed in my seat. Others tried to get me up but I refuse to bend to the pressure. I can’t help but feel that half of the people that stood up only did so because of the pressure of those around them. It’s like being the only person to stay in their seat during a Mexican wave. That, and most of the audience was made up of tired kids that have stayed up way too late on a school night.