Practically Perfect?

Mary Poppins
Florence Simmons Performance Hall, Charlottetown
March 6, 2026

Much like a certain wind-blown nanny, they have returned. When Summerside’s feistily ambitious 8th Avenue Players brought their excellent Godspell to Charlottetown last year, I was hoping we might see them hereabouts again; and sure enough, they’ve floated back to Holland College’s historic performance hall with another charming musical, Mary Poppins. 

First co-produced by Cameron Mackintosh and Disney in 2004, the show stars the titular magical nanny from the 1934 P. L. Travers children’s book and the 1964 Disney film. Mixing elements from the movie and the Travers books with new material, the stage musical blends movie songs by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman with a new script by Julian Fellowes and new songs by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. The resultant hybrid is both familiar and fresh for old-time Poppins fans. 

Set in 1910 London, it’s the tale of the troubled Banks family: irritable workaholic absentee father George (played here by Brandon Stafford), his supportive but anxious wife Winifred (Nadine Haddad) and their rambunctious children Jane and Michael (Natalie Waters and Steve Hughes), whose antics have felled a slew of nannies. Enter the mysterious Mary Poppins (Julia Cerisano), a supernaturally formidable childminder who leads the kids on weird adventures with her streetwise chum, jocular jack-of-all-trades Bert (Ryan Whitty). 

Hijinks ensue, as do valuable life lessons aplenty for the entire Banks clan. Between this and the parable-happy Godspell, one gets the sense the 8th Avenue gang like their musical theatre with a dollop of the didactic. 

Fortunately, as with Godspell, there’s theatrical fun mixed in with the character-building lessons. Film tunes like “Jolly Holiday,” “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Feed the Birds,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” and “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” all well-executed here, haven’t lost any of their shine, and new-to-the-musical songs like “Practically Perfect” (essentially Mary’s theme), “Precision and Order,” “Brimstone and Treacle,” and “Anything Can Happen” hold their own alongside the oldies. 

Those songs are anchored here by a 15-piece orchestra ably conducted by producer/music director Mark Cerisano and packed into the floor space just in front of the Florence Simmons stage, giving the production a big, rich sound matched by an even bigger cast of onstage singers with powerful pipes aplenty. 

Leading lady Cerisano, for instance, has a lovely singing voice and plays Mary with persuasive poise, though it’s a somewhat one-note performance emotionally; Poppins is a tricky character to pull off given Mary’s enigmatic ways and semi-perpetual air of brisk unflappability, and Cerisano often feels stuck in a single gear that’s recognizably Poppins but doesn’t paint the character with the fullest palette of nuance. 

Nuance can be tougher to project onstage than on film, what with the stage fostering a heightened or exaggerated mode of expression calibrated to connect with all corners of a live audience, but it can be done—Stafford, for instance, spends much of the play as a sonorously imperious martinet, so it hits all the harder when he brings delicate shadings of vulnerability and tenderness to his character in George’s softer moments. 

Stafford’s conflicted patriarch is a superb standout in a show full of memorable turns such as Haddad’s palpably yearning Winifred; a movingly melancholy Beth Rogers as the Bird Woman; an impishly lively Marius Lavoie as animated statue Neleus; a cheerfully daffy Samantha Bruce as oddball merchant Mrs. Corry; an effectively nasty Cadina Meadus (also designer of the show’s fine costumes) as sadistic rival nanny Miss Andrew, a sort of anti-Poppins figure from the books who gives the musical the one thing the movie lacks, a full-blown villain; crowd-pleasingly broad comedy from Gabrielle Roddy and Holly Arthur as Banks servants Mrs. Brill & Robertson Ay; and smart, capable performances from Waters and Hughes as the Banks kids, notably Hughes’ flair for commendably underplayed line readings netting many of the night’s biggest guffaws. 

Best of the bunch is Ryan Whitty (also designer of the show’s handsome sets) in the plum role of Bert, giving a funny, sly, fully inhabited performance that makes the most of every moment onstage, bringing distinctive, appealing character to the part even during the wordless, half-lit motions of scene changes. 

The production has its technical limitations—Mary never exactly flies, for instance, though director Hayden Lysecki and company use the venue’s sloped audience stairways for implied flight on occasion—but there are clever technical effects in spots, perhaps courtesy of Gregg Whitty, credited as “Magic Engineer” in the show’s crisply polished program designed by assistant producer/stage manager Vanessa MacArthur. All told, 8th Avenue’s latest effort is a refreshing swig of theatrical fun that goes down smooth, no spoonful of sugar required.