Stage favourite Mary Poppins opens at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney

Based on the Disney film and the story created by Pamela Travers, Mary Poppins is big on spectacle and has a huge heart.

Stefanie Jones, Jack Chambers and cast in Mary Poppins. Picture: Don Arnold/WireImage

The thing about Mary Poppins is that she comes precisely when she’s needed, flying in from heaven knows where to turn chaos into blissful order. Who couldn’t do with a bit of that?

Audiences in the amphitheatres of ancient Greece would have understood the situation implicitly. When mortals stuff things up, as we are wont to do, guidance from a higher plane is required.

The Banks family of Cherry Tree Lane are in sore need. Fractious father George (Tom Wren) is having trouble at the bank, his forbearing wife Winifred (Lucy Maunder) can’t hold on to a nanny, and children Jane and Michael (Chloe Delle-Vedove and William Steiner, both terrific on opening night) are running riot.

Enter Poppins.

It’s been 11 years since this gorgeous Disney-Cameron Mackintosh production was first staged in Australia. Now Stefanie Jones is firmly laced into Mary Poppins’s sensible shoes, her command and control absolute as she elegantly melds morals and magic.

Stefanie Jones as Mary Poppins. Picture: Don Arnold/WireImage

Poppins has a ramrod back and exacting manners. She brooks no argument and has a tart tongue. Whatever the problem, Mary can and will point the way to a solution.

She can also slide gracefully up a banister, pull large objects from a small bag and take her young charges to a psychedelically coloured park where statues come to life.

And, obviously, she can fly.

Jones brings all this together seamlessly, the strictness tempered by flashes of humour and sly wit. There are intimations, too, of the woman beneath all that beautifully strict, deeply flattering tailoring. As her admirer, Bert, puts it in the song Jolly Holiday: “When Mary holds your hand, you feel so grand. Your heart starts beating like a big brass band.”

Jack Chambers, whose dancing is phenomenal, is a wonderful foil for Jones, giving chimney-sweep Bert unexpected sweetness and more than a little touch of otherworldliness. It makes sense that he’s no slouch in the wizardry department as well, tapping upside down in the big Act Two production number, Step in Time.

Matthew Bourne’s choreography is a rare treasure but in truth there’s bewitchment everywhere you look, whether in the revisited storybook sets that have been given a hefty injection of colour or moments of joy and redemption that lift the spirits.

Even the initially irascible, closed-off George Banks gains our sympathy, particularly as seen through the nuanced lens of Maunder’s tenderness as his wife and Wren’s delicate handling of the piece’s trickiest part.

Mary Poppins with the Banks children. Picture: Don Arnold/WireImage

George, of course, is the product of terrifying old-school nannying. Chelsea Plumley brings shades of Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull as George’s Miss Andrew, extolling the virtues of brimstone and treacle. It’s a direct challenge to Poppins’s spoonful-of-sugar theory and the nanny-off between the two is deliriously funny.

In another scenery-chewing role, Hannah Waterman carries all before her as cook Mrs Brill while at the other end of the spectrum the legendary Nancye Hayes is a luminous Bird Woman.

Mary Poppins isn’t short of great songs, some from the 1964 film and others written for this staging. There isn’t a dud musical moment but perhaps the most memorable is the most understated. Feed the Birds is woven in and out of the work and at one point Hayes and Jones sing it together.

Nancye Hayes as the Bird Woman. Picture: Don Arnold/WireImage

On opening night the audience exhaled as one. Yes, Mary Poppins is laden with the kind of spectacle that gets people to their feet but it also has a huge heart. That’s its real magic.

Mary Poppins. Book by Julian Fellowes after Pamela Travers. Original songs by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman. New music and lyrics by George Stiles and Anthony Drew. Lyric Theatre, Sydney, May 26. Tickets: $59.90-$159.90. Bookings: online. Duration: 2hr 40min, including interval. Booking to September 4.