It's more than a year since P. L. Travers’s magical nanny came floating down from starry skies to alight on the West End stage and set all to rights in the Banks family’s dysfunctional home. She arrived to a chorus of approval that could turn even her sensible head; Richard Eyre’s production won rave reviews, and was even considered to be an improvement on the much-loved Disney film. Now that the excitement of the opening is past, and most of the original leading cast members have been replaced, does Mary Poppins still make a mouth- watering spoonful of sugar?

It does — and much more besides. Mary Poppins is crammed with delicious detail, every character from the enchanted statues in the park to the Banks’s servants is created with as much care and precision as Matthew Bourne and Stephen Mear’s witty choreography. Happily, despite the success, there’s no evidence of laziness or complacency. From its opening moment, as Bert’s chimney brush twirls out of a chimney pot, it’s a delight.

Scarlett Strallen’s Mary has exactly the right mix of sweetness and starch. Her eyes sparkle, her voice has lovely clarity and her air of inscrutability only adds to her restrained sexiness, so alluring to Gavin Lee’s Bert. Lee, an original cast member, is a charismatic dynamo whose relish for his role — tap-dancing on the ceiling included — seems undiminished.

Aden Gillett, as the crusty banker George Banks, is as crisp and desiccated as dead leaves, his eventual confrontation of the miserable childhood that has made him a chilly, remote father genuinely moving. Eliza Lumley’s warm Mrs Banks makes you feel her despair, trapped in an unhappy marriage — while Sarah Flind’s housekeeper and Andrew Pepper’s manservant supply riotous comic relief with their below-stairs squabbling and gossip. Top it all off with Lydia Bannister and Ross McCormack, one of five sets of young actors playing the two Banks children — pugnacious and precocious brats, whose bad behaviour stems from their parents’ problems — and you have a household that is whole-heartedly, sometimes horribly, human, and all the more likeable for it.

Rather than rotting the teeth, Mary Poppins gives you something substantial to sink them into — and it remains, like its heroine, practically perfect.

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