Too much sugar sours Smith Center’s ‘Mary Poppins’

Disney and Cameron Mackintosh's "Mary Poppins," now at The Smith Center through Sunday, is the sort of mediocre musical nice people are supposed to like.

It lays on the sentiment so thick that it divides its audience: some will undoubtedly respond strongly to its wholesome messages about family values and individual strength, while the more level-headed among us will see this streamlined product for the manipulative drivel it is.

But.

There's some good news.

Best bulletin of all regards the performance of Rachel Wallace in the title role. As a nanny who brings love and sanity to an insanely dysfunctional Edwardian family, Wallace is adorable without being cute, firm without being mean, and would you believe it, sensuous without losing her Girl Scout attitude. Her singing is powerful, playful, easy, operatic and sincere. Her dancing is lighthearted and precise. She's got, of course, the lead role, and yet, you don't feel you get enough of her.

More nice surprises: Q. Smith is a pleasantly evil governess, Tregoney Shepherd makes for an amusingly domineering but good-hearted cook, and Ryan Hilliard is a funny, no-nonsense bank chairman.

The problem - apart from the often expert technical magic - is everything else.

Julian Fellowes' book (based on P.L. Travers' novel and the 1964 Walt Disney film) has little structure. The dramatic events don't build into a cohesive whole, so that we often don't understand the relationship between scenes. (For example, the dancing on chimneys - which makes perfect sense in the movie - feels arbitrary here.) The film and book were moving, but not sentimental. Fellowes doesn't seem to trust the material. He lays on the tears so thick that you wind up wishing some tragedy would occur to make all that sugar go away.

The film's score was effortlessly touching, but here, too many new songs by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe are by-the-numbers flat. And too many moments are so showbiz big that they lose their intimacy.

There are enough visual effects to keep some content, but they are inadequate to one's hopes. It's only natural that we highly anticipate Poppins' first entrance, but all she does is suddenly appear onstage. When she and the two children and her pal, Bert, jump into a painting, there's no dazzlement. The set simply changes locales, so that we lose all sense of magic. And when Poppins finally does fly, it's a letdown. In this age of Cirque du Soleil we expect more than a set of wires carefully lifting up our star.

I have no doubt, though, that this production will please many. It's colorful and fanciful. And the Sherman brothers' better songs from the Disney version are reprised so often that you may find yourself trapped into applauding.

But I found this formulaic evening depressing. It's from the school of Broadway uplift, which is about as far from P.L. Travers as you can get.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheater chat@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.