HAS Mary Poppins the shamanic nanny dealt with the high wires or faulty umbrella propulsion that spoilt her flight plans in some previews? More importantly, does Mary Poppins the musical fly? Yes, and again, yes.

Long before Laura Michelle Kelly’s demure Mary has zoomed over the stalls into the theatre’s star-splattered eaves, this marvellously fresh adaptation of P. L. Travers’s stories had clearly won the hearts, minds, eyes and ears of last night’s audience. I don’t think it was just theatre chauvinism that left me thinking the show better in every way than the Disney film, delightful though that seemed 40 years ago.

Thanks to Matthew Bourne’s choreography and Bob Crowley’s designs, those ways extend to the visual, and, thanks to Richard Eyre’s direction and Julian Fellowes’ book, certainly embrace the content.

Poppins comes to earth with a purpose, and that isn’t to look pert, sing pretty songs and share side-trips with a chimney sweep with a bad Cockney accent. It’s to re-educate a family in trouble. Sounds didactic? No more, I think, than Travers would have wanted.

George Banks, the banker, isn’t merely pompous, like David Tomlinson in the film. As brilliantly played by David Haig, he’s emotionally cut-off and frustrated: an angry, wistful, very English man-child who has been brainwashed by his own nanny, here a “Holy Terror” who monstrously materialises with a witches’ brew of cod-liver oil, brimstone and treacle. No wonder Linzi Hateley, playing his wife, is so flustered and lost. No wonder his children (last night, Charlotte Spencer and Harry Stott) are so much more brattish than their Disney precursors.

Having taught everyone to appreciate everyone else, Kelly’s Poppins can soar heavenwards; but not before she’s left us plenty to remember. Silvery statues, including two Pans and even Queen Victoria, dance in the park. In a rather scarey sequence, rag-dolls, hussars and other nursery toys come accusingly to life and shoot naughty Jane and Michael. OK, there are no cartoon penguins or pearly kings — but who cares when, say, the the sweeps swivel and tap so perfectly on the roofs of a night-time London?

A few cavils. Why reduce Travers’s Admiral Boom to a walk-on? Doesn’t the ending smack a bit too much of the sentimentality the show mostly eschews? Could Kelly’s Poppins be more starchy and severe, as she is in the stories?

Maybe, but I enjoyed her brisk, slightly smug confidence, her singing voice and much, much else. You want magic? Even a bed materialises from her trademark bag. You want music? The original Sherman Brothers’ songs are there, plus some pleasing new ditties from George Stiles and Anthony Drewe.

You want spectacle? Some is literal, such as a Banks house that shifts to reveal roof, attic, hall, and a kitchen that hilariously falls apart and is inexplicably restored. Some is imaginative, such as a bank variously in debt to Dickens, Lowry and spidery Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious — or so I’d say.

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