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

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 there. Willow Shaw's Mrs Brill and Owen Fagan's Robertson Ay are a terrific comic double act below stairs, all long-suffering eye-rolls and disasters in the kitchen, and there is comedy tucked into corners of the ensemble scenes that you could easily miss if you were only watching the leads. For a show with a genuinely serious story underneath it, this production is very good at being light on its feet.

The Magic

Mary's carpet bag, which is visibly empty and then produces a hat stand, is the sort of thing that gets an audible reaction from an entire room, and it did. Then there is the cake. A plain cake, a cover placed over it for barely a second, and it is lifted away to reveal the thing fully iced. I have thought about that one more than is reasonable for a grown woman and I still cannot tell you how they did it.

And that is the point. None of it is a one-off gag, it is the idea the whole production is built on. Wendy Todd's set, in her sixteenth year designing for Trinity, keeps doing the same trick at scale: what looks like one thing folds out into another, Cherry Tree Lane becomes the park becomes the bank becomes the rooftops, all without the show ever stopping to catch its breath.

Angela Girgolas's costumes are full of period detail that rewards a closer look, and one of them is a showstopper in its own right: the carousel dress worn by Alexi Samonte as Mrs Corry, a spectacular full merry-go-round of a costume, complete with horses, and a lovely nod to the carousel scene in the original film. It got a reaction all by itself. Josh Kerr's lighting does a lot of quiet heavy lifting in the transitions. First class, all of it, and every bit of it says the same thing. There is more here than meets the eye.

Director Kristy Triantafilakis

Writes in the programme that her production centres not on the umbrella but on the kite, as a symbol of broken things being mended and love having the power to lift us up again. She also makes the point that Mary does not arrive to save the children, she comes to save Mr Banks. That reading comes through clearly on stage, and it is what makes the stage version the more interesting animal. It reaches back past Disney to P.L. Travers, which means sharper edges, a darker second act and a Banks family whose problems are real enough to matter, and this production leans into all of it rather than smoothing it over.

Tributes & Mentions

There are plenty of small tributes planted for those of us who know the film, the carousel dress being the most gorgeous of them, and plenty that was brand new to me: songs I had never heard, statues and toys coming to life, and a whole villain I did not know existed. Watching a story you think you know turn out to have extra rooms in it is a real pleasure.

I should also mention the live pit orchestra under Emma Knights, because it makes an enormous difference and should never be taken for granted. There is a warmth to a real band that a backing track cannot fake, and it lifted every number.

I wish I had the room to name every single person in this cast, because I genuinely would. The dancers, the ensemble, the students running things backstage in the dark, every one of them was fantastique, and the show only looks this good because all of them were pulling in the same direction. If your name is in that programme, you should be very proud of yourself.

So, for anyone in two minds. Go. Go for the spectacle, absolutely, but go for the reminder of what young people are capable of when someone hands them something difficult and trusts them with it. I went in carrying a film I have loved since I was small, which is a lot to ask any production to live up to. I came out with the story feeling bigger than it did before, and thinking about how much work, and how much heart, goes into two and a bit hours that look this effortless.

Anything can happen if you let it. It certainly did.