A Julie Andrews double-take on both sides of the Atlantic…

By a curious coincidence, not one but both of the roles that Julie Andrews immortalized in film musicals have been brought to the stage on consecutive nights on each side of the Atlantic – and I was at both. At the London Palladium on Wednesday, of course, it was Connie Fisher who inherited the role of Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music and made it completely her own; and then, taking an early morning flight yesterday, I was able to be at the Broadway premiere last night of the Mackintosh/Disney transfer of their London stage version of Mary Poppins, too, with Broadway ingénue Ashley Brown taking the title role originally taken in London by Laura Michelle Kelly.

Playing with the iconic memories that everyone has of the beloved Julie in these absolutely adored films, of course, ups the stakes even more for young actresses like these; but if – as Sondheim so eloquently put it in Sunday in the Park with George — the creative process is to “give us more to see”, then both of these productions and the performances in them succeed in doing so. Unlike the stage version of Dirty Dancing that recently opened at London’s Aldwych Theatre and whose sole creative impulse seems to be to merely replicate the film, both Jeremy Sams (in returning to the original stage version, with interpolations from the film score for The Sound of Music) and Richard Eyre and Matthew Bourne (co-directing Mary Poppins) have taken their familiar – perhaps over-familiar – properties, and freshened them up considerably.

Their lead actresses are a big part of that process. For Connie Fisher, her triumph is sweetly accentuated, of course, by the process that brought her here, namely the live nationwide television ‘audition’ that has already made her a household face. But she now earns her stripes by actually delivering a performance that also hits the bulls-eye, combining a natural vivacity with the tenacity that got her to the winning post.

Ashley Brown, the Broadway Poppins, has – like Laura Michelle Kelly did – served her dues in the more conventional way, steadily climbing through the ranks of other shows (her Broadway debut was as a take-over Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast) before reaching this point. But while it is Poppins is, of course, a more knowing character than Maria, it is also notable that Brown has a stronger air of confident authority as a performer, too, that she has built up through her earlier work.

I doubt that Fisher and Brown could swap roles. Yet Julie Andrews immortalized both. (To have created one iconic role is an achievement; to have created two, legendary). So her status is still secure, even as we see those roles through fresh eyes.