Mary Poppins
Prince Edward Theatre, London Until May 3, 2hrs 40mins
There’s no family show in town like it. Just watch Charlie Stemp (as Bert the chimney sweep) moonwalk up one side of the stage, tap-dance upside-down on the ceiling and then walk down the other side.
He’s joined on the rooftops by umpteen other sweeps in Step In Time, a total showstopper in this dazzling musical. Returning to London 15 years after it first opened in the West End – the first Disney musical to do so – the stage musical follows (mostly) the 1964 film.
Like trying to eat a sugar doughnut without licking your lips, try hearing Let’s Go Fly A Kite or Chim Chim Cher-ee without singing along. Oldsters will love Petula Clark’s cameo as the old biddy in Feed The Birds, yet another classic from Richard and Robert Sherman’s catalogue here, with added numbers by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe.
The great asset in Richard Eyre’s eye-socking production is Zizi Strallen. Umbrella up, feet splayed, her Mary Poppins is eccentric, sharp, but kind, and of course airborne
The great asset in Richard Eyre’s eye-socking production is Zizi Strallen. Umbrella up, feet splayed, her Mary Poppins is eccentric, sharp, but kind, and of course airborne. The visible wires don’t matter: she’s still magic.
The two Banks siblings are feisty, mutinying against their replacement nanny-from-hell. Amy Griffiths is nicely flustered as Mrs Banks and Joseph Millson is her emotionally stunted banker, George, who hits the skids.
When the children offer their daddy their saved-up sixpences, it was all too much for one sobbing tot in the stalls.
The technical wizardry of the London-town designs by Bob Crowley is astonishing. Indeed, the impossible seems always present: Mary slides up bannisters, a lead statue leaps to prancing life, and a giant Mr Punch scarily grabs the entire Banks house at Cherry Tree Lane.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is the word for this heart-felt family entertainment. ‘Just go’ is easier to say.
The Great Gatsby
Immersive LDN, London Until May 31, 2020, 2hrs 30mins
Rating: 
An old Army volunteer building in the middle of the West End is now a cocktail bar in Roaring Twenties mode. Ticket-holders for this ‘immersive’ show seem to know the form.
Everyone in the giant speakeasy, where most of the action is set, is dressed as if from the Leonardo DiCaprio film.
The opening is a hullabaloo of ankle flicking and palm circling as the entire joint – with light coaching from the cast – does the Charleston. It gives the famous party scene at the Gatsby mansion a rollicking great wallop.
All the good scenes involve a fiery Hannah Edwards (above with Humphrey Sitima as George Wilson), as the doomed, dissatisfied Myrtle
The cast usher the audience around various rooms, into scrappy scenes from the story, and Nick Carraway (James Lawrence), the book’s narrator, acts almost as emcee in this adaptation by Alexander Wright.
But Gatsby – played by Oliver Towse to Lucinda Turner’s Daisy – is never able to impose his glamorous non-persona on the proceedings. Indeed, all the good scenes involve a fiery Hannah Edwards, as the doomed, dissatisfied Myrtle.
Lovers of F Scott Fitzgerald’s glitzy, tragic anthem to the jazz age will, I suspect, want much more of the book than this production delivers. But those up for a full-on, Gatsby-themed dance party in its grandest venue by far, won’t be disappointed.