NEW YORK – Bob Crowley stands at the staircase of his latest three-story house, an Edwardian fixer-upper, happy to show off a few of its modern twists.
For one, the kitchen rises 20 feet out of the floor at the push of a button. For another, the bottom floors sweep backward and forward more than 40 feet. And the roof and upstairs nursery literally detach and float.
It’s a most remarkable home with a suitably remarkable address: 17 Cherry Tree Lane – the fictional house that Mary Poppins visits during a new stage adaptation of P.L. Travers’ classic story.
“My job is to make magic. That’s part of my job description,” said Crowley, designer and costumer for the Broadway musical, which opens today. “I like to be enchanted and enthralled myself. When I am, it makes life better. I have this great job where I can do it for 1,500 people a night.”
The Disney show, which won raves in London, has landed in New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre, and the Irish-born Crowley was again charged with building the centerpiece home, one of the heaviest and most expensive sets on Broadway.
“It is like a character almost,” he said. “I didn’t start doing all the other stuff – the fantasy stuff, as it were, the Mary Poppins kind of stuff – until after I knew how to do the house.”
What emerged is like an enormous three-sided doll house with multiple rooms, a functional staircase and upper floors that soar. The effect is as magical as anything Poppins does.
“Normally, when you have a three-story house onstage, it’s in a straight play and it just sits there all night,” said David Benken, the show’s technical director. “We had to be able to get rid of it and in a way that looked good from the audience.”
That was no easy feat: The first two stories weigh 10,000 pounds, the roof is 4,000 pounds and the floor and walls of the upstairs nursery combine for another 8,000 pounds. All are controlled by computers, timed to the music.
Add to that the logistical complexities of juggling 20 backdrops, actors who fly by way of cables, various illusions by a consultant for magician David Copperfield, 200 moving lights, various projected images, 40 microphones and a giant umbrella with a 24-foot diameter that pops out at the end. It takes an army of 29 stagehands to pull off each performance.
“It’s like a NATO maneuver here, come 8:02 p.m.,” said Crowley, a three-time Tony Award winner who has designed other Broadway shows such as “Tarzan,” “Aida” and “The History Boys.” “The ship sets sail, the train leaves the station and it doesn’t stop for three hours.”
Sometimes, of course, things can stop. On Oct. 25, the show screeched to a halt in the second act after the house went off its tracks. That day, a sprinkler system accidentally went off about 30 minutes into the London performance.
“When you’re dealing with computers and dealing with electricity, there are always glitches,” Crowley said. “The minute you’re using anything computerized, there’s always the chance they might come unstuck.”
Jane Carr, who plays the Banks’ housekeeper, says she and her fellow actors have gotten used to the complexities and now just hop on and off the scenery, waiting for the hydraulics to kick in.
“The times they are a-changing,” she said. “The days when it was stage left, stage right and French windows in the middle are way gone, you know. Every set is complicated to a degree these days – especially if there’s flying involved.”
The show also stars Ashley Brown as the magical nanny, Gavin Lee as the chimney sweep, and Daniel Jenkins and Rebecca Luker as Mr. and Mrs. Banks.
As if Crowley’s job weren’t tricky enough, he’s also in charge of all the costumes. But he insists that, in a weird way, the extra work makes it easier.
“It means I have total control over the stage picture,” he said. “I know what the color palette is at any given time and don’t have to talk to anyone about it. I can talk to myself.”
The production boasts additional songs by Anthony Drewe and George Stiles, augmenting the original music by Robert and Richard Sherman, who first coined the terms “Chim Chim Cher-ee” and “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
When first approached about tackling the project, Crowley, 54, instantly recalled the joy he had experienced while watching the 1964 movie version with Julie Andrews, as well as while reading Travers’ book.
“It was intimidating because the piece is so iconic – iconic through many generations,” he said. “I knew I was dealing with a well-treasured and loved piece of material.”
He knew the house would be more than just another set. “It’s the anchor. It’s the fireplace, as it were. It’s the heart and the hearth,” he said.
“You see the family separated in their different rooms – you see the father in his study, the mother in the drawing room and the children in the nursery, and no one is talking to each other. It’s a metaphor for the reason that Mary comes. She’s here to bring them together.”
Known more for his use of abstract, empty spaces, Crowley initially shied away from conceiving the Bankses’ home as it looks now, with walls and desks and carpets. That is, until director Richard Eyre intervened.
“I started very abstract with it. Richard said to me, ‘Well Bobby, you get 10 out of 10 for art, but two out of 10 for physics.’ It just didn’t work. You need a nursery, you need a fireplace, you need a roof for them to dance on,” Crowley said. “There are other parts of the show that can be abstract, but the house has to be real for you to believe in the family.”
Once he came around, Crowley next pondered how to move and float the nursery and its interconnected roof without having huge, noisy pistons underneath. The answer was cables – thicker than a man’s forearm – that lift the pieces 28 feet in the air.
The engineers also were able to hide the first two stories when needed by gliding that section 40 feet upstage thanks to a 200-horsepower motor. Other construction feats include a $250,000 bridge built at the top of the theater to which Mary Poppins can fly.
The kitchen, though, required the most work. It turns out to be a 24-foot-by-8-foot elevator built specifically for the show that rises out of the theater’s basement and weighs 20,000 pounds. It pops out behind a backdrop.
“It’s probably one of the most expensive moving piece of scenery I’ve ever done that the audience never gets to see how it happens,” Benken said.
Yet despite all the fancy technology at 17 Cherry Tree Lane, Carr notes that the human element can’t be forgotten. “If there weren’t any actors, it would all be a bit boring after a bit,” she said. “Thank God we’re still needed.”
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