Mary Poppins: The Broadway Musical at Trinity College is the real thing

Trinity College's production of Mary Poppins: The Broadway Musical delivers a full-scale, professionally executed staging that expands significantly on the Disney film, featuring accomplished performances from high school students across every technical and performance discipline. Rating: 5/5.

### More Than Meets the Eye: Trinity College's *Mary Poppins*

*Mary Poppins* has been one of my absolute favourites since I was a little girl. The film, I mean. I know it the way you know the things you loved young, which is to say completely and without ever having to think about it. What I had never seen was the stage musical, and that turned out to be the best possible way to walk into Trinity College's 2026 production of *Mary Poppins: The Broadway Musical*. I knew the songs I was waiting for. I did not know about half of what I actually got. If you have been putting off a school musical because you assume you know exactly what you're in for, this is the one to change your mind.

Because here is the thing I still cannot get over: these performers are in high school. I had to keep reminding myself. The voices, the discipline, the sheer stamina of it, none of it read as a school production. It read as a company who knew exactly what they were doing and were enjoying every second.

Start with the choreography, because that is where it hit me hardest. Caley Milhench's routines are big, fast and relentless, and the cast do not just execute them, they sell them. Dancing, singing, tap, acrobatics, the lot. It had absolutely everything, and it kept finding another gear right when you thought you had seen the peak of it.

"Step in Time" is the obvious showstopper, a full stage of chimney sweeps going flat out, taps hammering, bodies flying, and the energy coming off it was extraordinary. I sat there doing the maths on how many hours of rehearsal that represents. I could not remember one of those routines if you gave me a month. These kids had the lot of them, in costume, in character, while singing, and then went straight into the next number.

> " I loved a spoonful of sugar, it was my favourite and I loved the energetic vibes." -Scarlett, 8

### Eliana Girgolas as Mary Poppins

She is the reason the whole thing holds together. Playing Mary is harder than it looks, and harder still when everyone in the audience arrives with a version already in their head. Girgolas does not do an impression of anybody. Her Mary is crisp, perfectly composed and just slightly unreadable, with vocal control that never wobbles even when she is being carried through a dance number. She holds stillness on a big stage, which is the hardest thing there is to do, and because she plays the discipline so straight, the moments where warmth does break through land properly. "Practically Perfect," which is not in the film at all, set her stall out early and she never dropped it. A genuinely accomplished performance.

### Josh Roberts as Bert

Bert has the job nobody thanks you for. He opens the show, talks the audience into the world, links the scenes together and then hands every big moment to somebody else. Roberts does all of it with such ease that you stop noticing the machinery entirely, which is exactly the point. He is enormously likeable, his timing is sharp, and he is generous with the stage in a way that visibly lifts the people around him. He also has to sing, dance and keep an accent going simultaneously for two hours, and never once looked like he was working at it. By "Step in Time" he had the entire room.

### Kaelin Marett-Guest and Archer Thomas as Jane and Michael

These two carry more of the show than you would guess, and they are on stage for a huge chunk of it. The stage version gives Jane and Michael considerably more to do than the film does, and a fair bit more rope to be genuinely badly behaved, badly enough that you believe they have run off a string of nannies, while still being children you want to see happy. Marett-Guest and Thomas nail that balance. Their comic timing together is terrific, they bicker like real siblings rather than stage siblings, and they hold their own vocally alongside the adults. Watching them shift over the course of the show, from spoiled and prickly to something softer, is where the story actually happens.

### Chiara Puccini as Miss Andrew

Here is one the film never gave us. Act Two brings on George Banks's own childhood nanny, the Holy Terror herself, and Puccini is an absolute force. She arrives like a change in the weather and the temperature in the room drops. What I was not expecting, and what I am still talking about, is the growl. She sings with this genuinely evil rasp underneath the notes, dropping into it right when you think she is going to go pretty, and it is properly unsettling in the best possible way. "Brimstone and Treacle" was one of the highlights of the night. It takes real technique to make a voice do that and still hit everything cleanly, and real nerve to commit to a villain that hard in front of a hall full of people who know you. She got the reception she deserved.

Around them, Alex Carpenter plays George Banks with real restraint rather than as a cartoon, so when he finally cracks it lands. Miah Forsyth's Winifred quietly broke my heart in "Being Mrs Banks," another one the film does not have and one of the reasons this version has more going on underneath it.

> "I loved let’s go fly a kite! I loved Jane, you know, the young girl."- Mabel, 3

### The comedy

I was not expecting to laugh as much as I did. The show is funny from the opening scene, and a lot of that is down to Michael Herewane as Katie Nanna, the nanny who quits before Mary has even arrived. She flounces off in an absolute state, thoroughly defeated by two small children, and Herewane plays it so broadly and so precisely that the audience was gone within about thirty seconds. It is a small part that sets up the entire premise, and it landed perfectly.

The laughs keep coming from ther