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A mega-musical comes to small stage

Jesse Hollett
Posted 9/21/16

ORANGE PARK – With soot covered faces, chimneysweepers tap dance in tandem to a live band hidden away in the corner. The audience claps along.

Opening weekend for Mary Poppins at the Orange Park …

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A mega-musical comes to small stage


Posted

ORANGE PARK – With soot covered faces, chimneysweepers tap dance in tandem to a live band hidden away in the corner. The audience claps along.

Opening weekend for Mary Poppins at the Orange Park Community Theatre proved tiring for many involved in the production, but to the audience’s delight, they pulled it off.

It was touch and go at times, however.

“People would say ‘how in the world would the little Orange Park Community Theatre pull off Mary Poppins, because it’s such a big show,” said Michelle Nugent Manley, who plays Mary Poppins.

To put on a play with the scale of effects and expectations attached to Mary Poppins on a small stage takes a bit of penny pinching and a lot of alchemy involved in the set building.

Not to mention the difficulty of three months rehearsing from 42 volunteer actors exhausting their weekends and blowing their throats out.

The hard work paid off. Seats were rare on opening weekend and next weekend looks to be on track for the same. Hidden just off stage, a live band played popular tunes for the actors to sing, dance and act their way through.

The show occupies itself largely with snappy song and dance numbers creating a journey of self-discovery for every core character.

While based on the fantasy book series by P.L. Travers and its 1964 Disney movie offspring, this musical conjures new songs and a more intimate peek into the lives of its main characters.

The main premise remains, however – a magical nanny straightens out an uptight banker’s unhappy family.

Manley’s Poppins is the beneficent maternal presence who leads the children, Jane and Michael Banks played by Louise Everett and Alexander White on a journey with talking toys, animated statues and words as long as sentences.

Will Cook plays Bert, the congenial jack-of-all-trades who accompanies Mary and the children through Mary’s escapades. Bert debatably also gives the children an adult role model from a different social class, the social class of the wily, often cunning wriggle-to-survive laborer.

George Banks, played by Randall Thompkins, starts as a cold father whose emotional distance soon estranges his two children and wife Winifred, played by Tammy Jones.

Set in early 1900s London, the play makes several departures from its most recent movie adaptation, likely to limit scene changes.

While the small stage and budget constraints might seem like leashes for the success of the play, on the contrary, it seems to help communicate a deeper message in the play.

“I think that the Broadway version of this show is so much deeper than what people think of it from the Disney film,” Manley said. “It’s more about the characters and the family and real life situations that happen every day with families. It still has all the magic and tricks and all that, but the family is really the heart of the story.”

At times, the actors belt mere inches away from the front row without the need of a microphone. Entire scenes play out in the sidelines circumventing the rows.

“You can really focus on the message more so,” Cook said. “On the big stage you’re focused on the big numbers, the flying, Bert walking across the ceiling – I was all ready for that.”

The play is three hours long, which for children could feel like an eternity. Many of the bell and whistle effects expected from a show such as Mary Poppins – such as her flight on her umbrella – were removed altogether.

Nevertheless, the play succeeded in moving the audience given the structural limitations of the building and stage.

Veteran director team Connie Senkowski and Bob Houston had their work cut out for them to bring such a large-scale operation to such a small venue, but the audience feedback justified the work.

“When you have a great audience, they generate the audience that the performers need,” Houston said.

Given the many scene changes, economy of set remained paramount to the overall completion of the play. Background paintings sat on three-sided canvases stamped into the ambient space of the set, framing the actors in parks, the family living room and London’s night sky.

Dance numbers and the choreography therein fit the small stage, even near the end of the play when nearly every actor crowded the stage and sang directly to the audience.

OPCT runs weekend shows of Mary Poppins through Oct. 2. When the show is done and all the audience satisfied, though, the theatre company will say goodbye to the gloves, the umbrella and the chimney sweep and look forward to their next show.

“To me, once you’re in a show, this is your new family, because you spend an enormous amount of time with each other learning to respect their performance and your own. It is a family for three months,” Houston said.

To buy tickets go online at www.showtixnow.com or call (904) 276-2599