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There’s a spoof video on YouTube where the original trailer of Disney’s 1964 film Mary Poppins has been re-edited as Scary Mary, a slasher movie. The thing is, it’s not far from the truth: Looked at soberly through adult eyes, Mary Poppins is less benevolent nanny who twitches her nose like a guest star on Bewitched, and more a mysterious immortal with telekenesis — Carrie White after menopause. She’s like Glinda the Good Witch: magical, but not to be trifled with. There are elements to P.L. Travers’ book series that recall Harry Potter, though it’s all basically a harmless fantasy-adventure series, with loosely related vignettes that don’t tell a cohesive story like Rowling does; the structure most of us are familiar with came with the Disney movie.
The stage version of Mary Poppins, now at the Music Hall for a two-week run courtesy of Dallas Summer Musicals, is less an adaptation of the movie musical than a hodgepodge of elements from the first three books, plus songs from film, plus eight new songs. As a result, it’s not quite loyal to any one source, picking through the scraps in the fossil record like a magpie. Gone are some songs and plot-points from the film (“I Love to Laugh” and the tea party on the ceiling; “Sister Suffragettes” and the entire political subplot about women’s independence, etc.), and added are more numbers, some of which slide surreptitiously under the radar, evocative of the original score (“Being Mrs. Banks,” “Practically Perfect”) and some of which do not (“Brimstone and Treacle,” “Temper, Temper”). The result is that the stage version is neither fish nor fowl — not a musical for purists of the books or the film. If you go in expecting one or the other, you’ll leave unsatisfied.
There’s nothing like a tuneful Gershwin musical, and Crazy for You, now at Theatre 3, is indeed nothing like one (at least not at the weekend preview I attended). The orchestrations are muffled and fail to emphasize the right instruments; some songs, like “Embraceable You,” are paced too slowly while others, such as “Someone to Watch Over Me,” are rushed. The production feels way too much like the “Hey gang, let’s put on a show in the barn” musical that its plot entails.
Remember those elementary school history pageants where a kid plays Abraham Lincoln in an ill-fitting Sunday suit and stovepipe hat made out of construction paper and tape? Or the School House Rock sequences on Saturday morning cartoons? They were all about teaching history in accessible, simple ways.
Ohlook, the self-described “crazy little theater in Grapevine” which 
Any true Texan has likely seen Giant, the movie. It’s a thing, here. But now the story gets the stage treatment with musical numbers by Michael John LaChiusa ad directed by three-time Tony nominee Michael Greif. The Dallas Theater Center goes way big for this epic story of love, redemption and acceptance on the backdrop of the Texas flatlands and the booming oil industry.
Woody’s goes from macho to musical on Tuesdays with its long running Show Tunes Night. Sing along because you know will to all the classics from MGM up to today’s Broadway shows and likely a few surprises in between. It’s best with a group because then you can prove who the biggest theater queen is of the night.
