Mary Poppins is one of the relatively newer musicals on at the West End opening in December 2004 so discounts tickets have been very hard to come by, therefore the Get Into London Theatre promotion was happily received by me and I jumped at the chance to go.

Mary Poppins has been on my to do list for quite some time so I was really looking forward to seeing the production – and I wasn’t disappointed. Of course Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke are an extremely hard act to follow – but I think that the actress and actor playing their roles (sorry – names escape me) pulled it off fairly well.

The songs and the acting were on par with what I expected and the movie trademark songs (Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, A Spoonful of Sugar, Chim Chim Cher-ee, Let’s Go Fly A Kite) were toe tappingly infectious. There were also some new songs including Practically Perfect (to introduce Mary to the children.) The choreography was pretty good – but the impact was probably less for me as I was sitting off to the side a bit – and one stand out scene involved Bert walking up one wall, across the ceiling and then down the other wall. There were also some moments of magic with Mary pulling out a tree, lamp, and full length mirror from her bag.

What I enjoyed most was the set – it was in a word – brilliant. Somehow the designers were able to fit a two story house (17 Cherry Tree Lane) plus the roof on to the stage – with floors moving up and down as required. In addition to Cherry Tree Lan they were able to take us to the park, to the markets, and to the bank. Brilliant engineering.

Overall, Mary Poppins is a fairly enjoyable musical and, although Lion King still rates as my favourite, Mary Poppins definitely rates up there.

I’d booked to see the original show in Vegas back in 2004 but unfortunately it was cancelled so even though I was a bit hesitant about the price tag for the London show I figured it hey ho you only live once. I was not disappointed.

This is one “experience” that cannot be categorised – to call it “performance art” is understating it. There is comedy, theatre, music, art but again to describe it like this fails to capture the entire experience. The basic concept is three blue men who present a series of sketches/segments (and for those who have a mind even contains political messages) and although simply put this way, the actual production is the result of some very out of the box thinking.

The show actually starts with messages scrolling across two small LED screens on either side of the stage. Whilst people are still filing in, they held the usual messages such as: no photography, no film, no interval, no smoking and some other not so ordinary messages such as “Please take a moment to turn off all mobile phones, pagers, gameboys, palm pilots, skyliner wands (what the?), laptops and portable fax machines” because yes if I’m going to a show I will have brought my portable fax machine and it will be on.

Once the show formally starts these messages turned into all sort of messages from congratulations (we had the 1986 Booker Prize winner and some dude who worked on the Human Genome), to happy birthdays, to greetings (including a lady who had had tickets bought for her by her co-workers RyanAir – who was asked to show us the emergency exits), and even a commiseration to some lady who had a headache. Of course this all involved crowd participation which was quite amusing.

This actually proved to be a great warm-up and got the crowd going – which is an important part of the entire show – it is very interactive and relies heavily on a good crowd.

The show is fairly heavy on percussion (necessary to give the rhythm) and paint (for the visual aspect) and lighting (be prepared for a lot of strobe lighting) so be prepared, they are not used in all acts – just most of them! The brilliant thing about the show is the ability of the group to really use their physical surrounds from the stage, to the audience seating, to the roof above our heads, to incorporating projection, TVs, giant LCD screens, to the simple use of glass, whipped cream and projected images to present a story, to shoving a video camera down an audience member’s throat to see what the guy had for dinner! (well, sort of) and even using an audience member as a sort of giant paint brush – I was constantly amazed. One of the more simple skits was one blue man throwing marshmallows/clay at another who caught it in their mouth – I have trouble catching one when I through it in the air let alone 10-15 all in a row and thrown pretty much flat at me!

The finale involved giant rolls of paper being unrolled from the ceiling at the back of the audience to be pushed forward by us to the stage to some pulsing music. It created an interesting ocean of paper (paper which is recycled by the way!) I think everyone really had fun with that one.

Blue Man Group definitely gets my recommendation.

I wanna join the circus!! This is the type of emotion that tonight’s show invoked in me at the finale … and from what I could hear in most of the people around me too.

The spectacular tonight combined three arts woven into one story – the acrobats of the Chinese State Circus, the martial artists of the Shaolin Wu-Shu Warriors and the performers from the Peking Opera.

The show really is too amazing to describe and is something that needs to be experienced in person. You’ve got acrobatics, contortionists, the classic strong man, dancing lions (something that creeped me out when I was a kid but now I can appreciate the grace of them thrills me to no end), juggling, tight-rope walking on both the slack wire and double-wires in ways you couldn’t imagine (I mean they were doing things I couldn’t even do on the ground!), pole jumping, martial arts on and off the ground. The Mystery of 100 Faces was a pretty cool contribution by the Peking Opera too.

Unfortunately, it was over all too soon!