When Mary Poppins was on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre, it was a high-flying extravaganza. The umbrella-toting title character went rising, rising, rising from the stage, drifting out over the audience until she was able to get eye-to-eye with ticketholders in the upper balcony. In 2006, the Washington Post reviewer called Mary-taking-wing “the most bewitching thing to hover over a Broadway audience in years.”
Mary flew in Atlanta, too, when Aurora Theatre staged the Disney show in 2014, but her flight was a relative puddle-jumper, limited to some turns over the stage. So, when plans were zipping along for the Lawrenceville Arts Center, Aurora’s new home that opened late last year, company co-founder Ann-Carol Pence knew she wanted to remount the Cameron Mackintosh musical so that Mary could fly and spread joy all across the 500-seat mainstage. That’s how the just-opened show became the troupe’s 27th season opener.
“Ann-Carol has said from the beginning, when we got the rights to the show and had planned on [remounting it], that she was putting her foot down on that one,” production manager Daniel Pope shares about the matter of Mary taking wing over the audience. “[Ann-Carol] was like, ‘She has to do it. I don’t care what else — she has to do it.’ And I was like” — he pauses to laugh about his boss’ won’t-take-no-for-an-answer determination — “‘OK, we’ll figure it out!’’’
And with the help of flymen from D2 Flying Effects, they have done just that. The team has built two flying apparatuses — one for over the stage and the other for venturing out over the house.
“The one over stage is manual . . . all driven by people,” Pope explains, “so there are ropes that carry her across the stage and up and down. And then the one over the house is entirely motorized. And it’s this huge length,” with the help of a 75-foot track that takes her out into the audience and back to the stage.
Having staged the tech- and effects-heavy Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella earlier this year, the Aurora crew is feeling emboldened about frequent flyer Mary.
The brave Galen Crawley has returned to portray the gravity-defying lead, along with fellow Suzi Bass Award winner Andy Meeks as Bert, Mary’s scruffy chimney-sweep friend.
Right on cue and timed with the music, Crawley simply has to get clipped into her harness, open her umbrella, and away she flies over the audience with the motors doing the (not-so)-heavy lift.
During early rehearsals, Crawley says she wondered how nervous she would feel getting back into the harness, not only years after her first go-round, but higher — nearly 40 feet up — and longer than before.
“You know, I got in the harness and was like, ‘Yeah, it’s been nearly a decade, but it really feels like it could have been yesterday. It was just so easy.’”
Flying over people seated in the house, however — that was a different story.
“In one rehearsal, a bunch of people went up and sat in the balcony, and they flew me up over the audience because we needed to test and see how many seats need to be taken out — there are a couple spots that, if people were in those seats, I would decapitate them. As I was going up and seeing the people, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m actually a little nervous.’ It was a kind of weird, really bizarre sensation to be like, ‘I am eye-to-eye with the people in the mezzanine right now!’ It was really wild.”
Crawley adds that of all the challenges she faces as the lead in this show, flying really isn’t the most fear-inducing.
“I’m gonna be honest, the spelling in ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ is a lot more intimidating than any flying!”
She says that in addition to her familiarity with the show, the presence of her supportive co-star Meeks has dissipated the small moments of nervousness she experienced in rehearsals.
“So much of my show is with Andy,” Crawley says. “He and I have this Mary and Bert relationship onstage and off. The moment that we met each other, at our promo photo shoot for the first Mary Poppins, we’ve just been able to be there for each other. And getting to return to this with him is so cool because anything else that happens around us, no matter how crazy any of it is, he and I are just like, ‘We’re here. We’re doing our thing. Let’s do it. Let’s go.’”
Meeks also has some airborne moments when he dances across the ceiling. To accomplish this feat, the actor rises 24 feet into the air and then tap-dances upside-down and does flips in mid air before climbing back down the proscenium.
As last Thursday’s opening night was approaching, Crawley and Pope said they were looking forward to performances with (and over) audiences aboard as they worked with the special stagecraft.
Pope allowed that while such technical feats are always exciting to create, there is an obvious added pressure to effects focused on performers. Creating magic is great, but safety “is the number one thing,” he said.
“It’s really great to be able to watch [Crawley] fly out over the house and know that we’ve tested it, it’s running, it’s good, and,” Pope added wryly, “she’s not gonna fall out of the sky, because we don’t want that.”
Most certainly not! That would not be “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
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Sally Henry Fuller is a theater nerd and performing arts journalist with a passion for telling people’s stories. When she’s not interviewing artists, you can find her in a local coffee shop or watching a musical with her husband.
