When I express an opinion here, I can usually count on a deluge of e-mails that disagree, sometimes rudely, with whatever I said. There are times when you feel you could write "Robbing orphans at gunpoint is not a nice thing to do" and you'd hear from an angry, outraged mob who insisted it was and how could any sane person possibly think otherwise? So I'm a little startled how many messages I've received that agreed with my disappointment with the musical stage version of Mary Poppins and how I've gotten none from anyone who enjoyed it. (I've also heard from a lot of folks who said, "Thank God! I thought I was the only one in the world who didn't like Carousel!")
More and more as I think about the former, I'm thinking of things I didn't like about it…and this might be a good time for one of my snazzy SPOILER ALERT signs…
Okay, now I feel I can talk without fear of ruining the show for you. I'm not saying not to see it, by the way; just to lower your expectations way, way down. Brace yourself, for example, for the fact that the title character doesn't feel all that magical. She does magic tricks but they seem to be emanating more from the stage crew than from her. Bert the Chimney Sweep feels more magical than she does, by far. He was kind of inexplicably magical in the movie too, but there, you felt that his magic was made possible by his proximity to her. His made hers feel more special. On stage, his upstages hers. Everything Bert does upstages Mary Poppins.
I also didn't mention, as many readers reminded me, that Act Two pretty much starts with Mary Poppins killing someone in a pretty gruesome manner. What the hell was that all about? I'll get back to that in a sec.
The kids are pretty boring and there's no sense that their lives are changed by hanging around Ms. Poppins; just that she entertains them for a while. Also, I might have noted a problem with the main plot, which is that Mr. Banks is worried about losing the income from his job at the bank.
It's tough for us to care about possible job loss with regard to a banker…and doubly tough to fret for a banker with a beautiful mansion and a staff of servants. In the movie, Mr. Banks had an attitude problem about his job. He cared way too much about it. P.L. Travers named him as she named him for a reason; his whole identity was inextricably lost in that financial institution. Still, the way she (and later, the Disney folks) configured things, we cared about Mr. Banks not as a banker but as a father…one who was way too worried about providing for his family to the extent of neglecting his children and his own inner child. In the end, he rediscovered all those children, especially his inner one, and realized that there could be more to life than earning a living.
Mr. Banks on stage pays brief lip service to that realization but basically, his problem is solved not because he changes but because he just plain doesn't lose his job. His happy ending, such as it is, isn't that he becomes a better person. It's that he becomes a more highly-paid banker. And as I said in my first review, Mary Poppins doesn't have much to do with that.
Mrs. Banks, who was in many ways the most interesting character in the film, is similarly diminished. The movie version of the lady gave purpose to her life as a Suffragette. She may have had to leave her kids to a series of nannies because she was busy but at least she was busy for a good cause. The Mrs. Banks of the play doesn't seem to have much to do. She throws some sort of luncheon for people who don't show up and then it's never mentioned again. So, uh, Mrs. Banks…why don't you raise your kids instead of handing them over to another in a series of strangers?
In the middle of the musical, Mary Poppins leaves inexplicably. Her credo is that she comes to a household and stays until she achieves her mission, whatever it is for that particular family. But just before Intermission, when she couldn't possibly have achieved anything, she leaves. The parents come up with a demonic replacement — one who (I think, it's not clear) was once Mr. Banks's nanny. So I guess the idea is that when Mary Poppins returns, she rescues the kids from turning out like Mr. Banks. But she oughta be rescuing them from parents who'd hire someone that evil as a babysitter.
So we don't like the parents for hiring such a replacement. And we don't like Mary for throwing her little hissy fit or whatever her reason was for walking/flying off the job and abandoning the kids to such a monster. I like her for getting rid of the monster but not so much for how she does it, which feels like capital punishment for a non-capital crime. I don't like anyone on that stage, except maybe Bert, and don't care what becomes of them. And I especially don't like me for going on so long on this topic.
To be fair, I didn't feel all of the above while I was sitting there, intermittently enjoying what was on stage. But the more I thought about the movie after viewing it, the more I liked it. The more I thought about the play, the more I liked the movie. Which is why the film will endure forever and the musical will end when the tour does.