my fair lady; Richard Eyre's smash-hit new production of Mary Poppins stars Laura Michelle Kelly as everyone's favorite flying nanny.(Theater Review)

Byline: Hamish Bowles

Amid a shower of cherry blossoms and magic, Mary Poppins has finally materialized on the London stage in the comely form of Laura Michelle Kelly. Directed by Richard Eyre, this dazzling musical adaptation of P. L. Travers's beloved books evokes the enchantment of a sequestered Edwardian childhood, a world of magicians and magic lanterns, fairy tales and morality tales. While this cut-crystal nanny might brook no nonsense as she urges the Banks children to run along "spit-spot," in real-life the ravishing, jasper-eyed Kelly, 23, is an unspoiled ingenue whose career has followed a trajectory as dramatic as her character's star-spangled stage exit. "She is an odd combination of preternatural maturity and genuine innocence," says Eyre. In New York to play Hodel in David Leveaux's recent Broadway Fiddler on the Roof, for instance, Kelly couldn't write the folks back home, because "I couldn't find a postbox-they looked different, like an English bin [trash can]!" Naive she may be, but her talent is indisputable. "The only other person I've met who had that sense of her own destiny," says Eyre, "was Angela Gheorghiu"-the brilliant Romanian soprano whom he directed in La Traviata in 1994.

Kelly was raised on the quaintly old-fashioned Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. "There wasn't a lot to do," she remembers, so she and her three brothers (now performers all) sang for their fellow churchgoers and took acting lessons. "We all seemed to have a passion for it. From the age of eleven I was always onstage," remembers Kelly. "we did every musical you've ever known!" They also scoured the Stage newspaper for open auditions, one of which landed the seventeen-year-old Kelly her first West End role-as Belle in Beauty and the Beast. She went on to garner raves as the third and final Eliza in Trevor Nunn's traditional, award-winning staging of My Fair Lady. With Poppins, Kelly soars to even greater heights-quite literally at some points in this production.

The same wonderment that characterized Eyre's coproduction of the glittering and poignant Carousel in New York in 1994 is seen here, too, notably in the spirited choreography of Matthew Bourne (celebrated for his ...