The Emmy nominations have just been announced, and it’s another good year for Julian Fellowes, creator/writer of the PBS hit “Downton Abbey.” Coincidentally, I just happened to revisit “Mary Poppins” earlier this week, and guess who wrote the book? Yep, none other than Mr. Fellowes, aka Baron Fellowes of West Stafford. The musical opened on Broadway in 2006, two years after London, and though it drew from the P.L. Travers books and the 1964 movie, it was familiar territory for Fellowes: He’d mined the upstairs/downstairs dynamics in “Gosford Park” and would refine it further in “Downton Abbey.” After all, the starting point here is how hard it it to find good help. The two Banks kids are so bratty — at least to start with — only a supernatural nanny can handle them.
But the reason I went back to “Mary Poppins” for the first time in almost six years was to check out how it’s looking these days. You see, I think it’s one of the most terminally underrated modern Broadway shows, and certainly among the very best in the crop of long-running hits. I usually recommend it to out-of-town visitors — even if they don’t have kids! — and I wanted to make sure my tip still holds.
It does. In purely visual terms, “Mary Poppins” is an absolute feast, and surely among the most beautiful productions of the past decade. It is put together with a breathtakingly inventive and poetic elegance. Particularly wonderful are the transitions from reality to fantasy and back, brilliantly executed by choreographer Matthew Bourne and director Richard Eyre in numbers like “Jolly Holiday” and “Playing the Game.” They can compare to the way Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly handled such moments in the movies “An American in Paris” and “The Pirate.” It’s not enough to just stick numbers into a show: Music and dance must flow in and out of the narrative seamlessly, and that’s precisely where “Mary Poppins” excels.
And speaking of seamless: I’d forgotten how well George Stiles and Anthony Drewe’s new songs work with the famous ones by the Sherman brothers. “Practically Perfect” and “Anything Can Happen” have such a classic ring, you’re surprised to discover that they’re new.
Aside from some loud backstage noises in the second act — I felt I was back at Robert Lepage’s “Ring” at the Met — the show was in very good shape on Tuesday. It helps that the original Bert, the rubber-limbed Gavin Lee, is back in the role, providing a solid foil to the current super-nanny, Steffanie Leigh. When she takes off above the audience at the end, that seemingly simple bit flight of fancy makes “Spider-Man” look even more garish.