The Battle For Broadway: Poppins vs. Dylan Plus Grey Gardens and Spring Awakening

By Richard Zoglin

We've seen elephants parading down the aisle, wildebeest stampedes, dancing flatware and jungle creatures flying through the air on bungee cords. But ever since the Walt Disney Co. discovered--first with Beauty and the Beast and most decisively, in 1997, with The Lion King--that its popular movies could have a long and profitable second life onstage, a prim English nanny has been waiting patiently in the wings. She was the star of one of the most beloved of all Disney movies, which boasted a made-to-order musical score--and real human characters to boot, who didn't need any tricky puppets or elaborate stage contraptions to be reborn onstage.

That it took Mary Poppins--the 1964 film starring Julie Andrews and based on P.L. Travers' stories--so long to make the leap from screen to stage has to do mainly with boring adult things like copyrights. In 1993 London theater impresario Cameron Mackintosh bought the rights to the Mary Poppins stories from their nonagenarian author (who was never happy with the Disney movie, which she felt prettified her material). But Disney had the rights to the film, including the all-important songs. The two eventually got together in a collaboration for the theater history books: Disney, the studio that virtually reinvented the family musical, and Mackintosh, king of the modern megamusical, with a string of hits including Cats, Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon.

And yet, when it finally opens on Broadway next week, the lavish and lovely stage version of Mary Poppins will be flying into a stiffer headwind than it could ever have expected. Here's the medicine with the spoonful of sugar: a lot has changed in the nine years since The Lion King's innovative mix of puppetry, dance and set design transformed Broadway. The era of the giant musical spectacle is in eclipse. The real news on Broadway over the past few seasons has been the success of smaller, edgier musicals: shows like Urinetown, Avenue Q and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. A decade ago, these musicals would have been content to settle for a small but enthusiastic coterie of off-Broadway fans. Now they're moving to Broadway, having long runs and stealing Tonys away from the big boys.

The trend is even more striking this fall. Choreographer Twyla Tharp, who had a surprise hit four years ago with Movin' Out, her dance interpretation of Billy Joel music, is attempting a similar feat with The Times They Are A-Changin', based on the songs of Bob Dylan. A more problematic show with a murky story line, it is set in a grungy-chic circus that is more distracting than illuminating. But there's no mistaking that it's a musical with a personal vision--not to mention one of the best sound tracks on Broadway.

Another small show that has just made the jump from off-Broadway to on: Grey Gardens, a surprisingly fresh and moving expansion of the 1975 documentary about two eccentric relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis living in squalor in East Hampton, N.Y. It made the risky move with help from its incandescent star, Christine Ebersole, who rounded up the first chunk of financing herself. Still to come is an even more unlikely Broadway transfer: Spring Awakening, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind's play about coming of age in repressive Germany in the late 19th century. The music is post-Rent rock; the sets are little more than rows of dowdy school desks. There's onstage masturbation, an abortion and a suicide. Leave the kids at home.

The rise of the edgy little shows is partly a reaction to the effects-laden, can-you-top-this grandiosity of so many stage musicals of the '80s and '90s. Those falling chandeliers and hovering helicopters may once have been visually startling and dramatically potent, but after a while you get tired of applauding the sets. Add to that a subtle resentment by the guardians of Broadway tradition over the huge success of Disney. Some feared that the company's deep pockets and corporate approach (developing and marketing several shows at the same time, movie studio--style) would squeeze out the small producers, who typically cobble together investors one show at a time.

In reality, little has changed. Most Broadway shows are still produced the old-fashioned, cobbled-together way (although some of those investors are now big corporations). And that does not necessarily make the shows better or more reflective of a personal vision. "What I love about Disney," says Mackintosh, "is it's actually carrying on the tradition of one person producing a show" (that would be Tom Schumacher, head of Disney's theatrical division, who has overseen every Disney stage show since The Lion King). "What I hate now is a conglomeration, where there's more producers on top of the bill than actors on the stage."

Indeed, the backlash against the big pop-musical extravaganzas is an unfortunate symptom of the split--in theater more than almost any other art form--between the works that critics and theater aficionados hail and the ones that, very often, draw huge audiences. Most of the big-musical extravaganzas that have gone on to long Broadway runs in the past couple of decades, from Cats to Wicked, have done so despite tepid or negative initial reviews.

And the scorn that's routinely heaped on Disney's "theme-park" approach to theater has become code language for a fusty prejudice in favor of old-fashioned literary theater at the expense of the visual, aural and, yes, magical delights that can make seeing a show onstage a unique imaginative experience. So strong is the backlash that Tarzan, Disney's latest, critically denounced show, couldn't even snag a Tony nomination for its dazzling sets or the inventive aerial choreography by Pichon Baldinu, co-founder of the experimental De La Guarda troupe. ("Between you and me," announced director-designer Bob Crowley, accepting a Tony for his more pedestrian work on The History Boys, "I should have won it for the other one.")

So, can a big, square, family-friendly show like Mary Poppins make it in a season in which hip curios are in vogue? Poor Mary has already got some preopening scolding. Despite its two-year, nearly sold-out run in London (and an advance sale of more than $20 million in the U.S.), some have deemed the show too dark for delicate American kids. The chief culprit: a new number called Temper, Temper, in which toys in the children's bedroom come to life. The fears are silly; Pinocchio was scarier. But the concerns are rather sweet--as if the critics were inventing some bad behavior for their goody-goody friend to make sure she gets accepted into the cool kids' club.

In fact, Mary Poppins is not just a big, eye-pleasing production; it's Disney's most endearing, human-scaled and emotionally satisfying musical yet. The familiar Sherman Brothers score has been updated with seven new tunes (by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe), which blend in seamlessly--in some cases, even better than that, since they're more integral to character and plot, like Mary's sprightly, perfectly apropos opening number, Practically Perfect. The show strikes a nice balance between stage dazzle--avant-garde choreographer Matthew Bourne brings statues to life and defies gravity in more ways than one--and dramatic heft with a script (by Gosford Park screenwriter Julian Fellowes) that goes beyond the movie, adding material from other Travers stories.

All this subtly shifts the focus away from the children and their nanny (a spunky, Americanized Mary played by newcomer Ashley Brown) and to the adults. When the uptight Mr. Banks begins to panic that he may lose his job at the bank, there's real pain and poignancy as his crusty shell starts to crumble. (Mrs. Banks: "If you have problems, I want to share them." Mr. Banks: "Believe me, you will.") This Mary becomes a show less about children than about the loss of childhood--and about how adults learn to be parents. Which is just what a big show needs: a big subject.