super nanny; Adam Green meets the Southern girl starring in Mary Poppins.

When Ashley Brown, an aspiring singer and actress from Gulf Breeze, Florida, blew into New York in 2004, she was, she says, "totally prepared to wait tables for a few years." She never got the chance. Within weeks, Brown was cast in On the Record, a touring revue of Disney musical chestnuts. Brown then caught the eye-and ears-of Disney Theatrical's Thomas Schumacher, who cast her as Belle in Broadway's monster hit Beauty and the Beast. One night last April, Schumacher turned up in Brown's dressing room with big news: She had been chosen to play the world's most unflappable English nanny in the New York production of the London smash Mary Poppins. "The award for Most Dramatic Reaction Ever goes to me," Brown says. "I literally collapsed on the floor and started weeping."

Brown made her solo debut at six, as a ballad-belting lamb in a church musical called Baa Baa Bethlehem. She went on to play a tree, a doorknob, and a doily before landing such flesh-and-blood roles as Maria in West Side Story and Cunegonde in Candide. For a girl who grew up watching Uncle Walt's 1964 movie of Mary Poppins, the chance to step into Julie Andrews's iconic bustle skirt is both thrilling and daunting. "If I think about it too much, I want to jump off a tall building," she says.

Brown's apprehension seems fitting for a darkly fantastical reimagining of a Disney classic, which equally evokes the wonder and terror of childhood. As ever, the story centers on the dysfunctional Banks family and the mysterious stranger who swoops in to set things straight before flying off toward the horizon-sort of like Alan Ladd in Shane, with an umbrella. The Banks children still learn that "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," but they also discover that neglected toys can come to life and scare the bejesus out of them. For this Mary Poppins, coproducer Cameron Mackintosh-who gave us Cats, Les Miserables, and The Phantom of ...