Mary Poppins Showing At The Peabody Opera House


ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI)--  It's a timeless classic. And it is the final show of the first broadway series at the Peabody Opera House.

It would be hard to top the classic Disney movie, but the Disney Broadway musical comes pretty close.

For Rachel Wallace, landing the role of Mary Poppins was her big break and she loves it, especially because the show draws so many children to the theater.

"When you are lucky they talk back to you. People say doesn't that get distracting and I say no, you crave that because that`s how you know they are listening and involved," she said.

The role of Bert belongs to Case Dillard, who as a boy wanted to take dance lessons so he could moonwalk.

In Mary Poppins, he gets to spacewalk, dancing upside down.

"I like it because I have been dancing for so long and I have so much blood in my feet it is nice to kind of go the other way for a minute a recalibrate my system," he said.

In some ways the musical is different than the movie, and the writer who updated it is Julian Fellows, the creator of the hit TV series Downton Abbey.

"There are so many similar characters, and those similar characters have similar speech patterns. It lives in the same world. The Banks family is not as wealthy as the family in Downton Abbey, but it explores the same dynamics," Wallace said.

Mary Poppins is at the Peabody through Sunday. Then she folds up her umbrella and flies to Arizona.

On Wednesday, Mayor Francis Slay officially declared this Mary Poppins week in St. Louis.
