Bedknobs and Broomsticks review: a magical celebration of the power of imagination

You wait Covid-protracted ages for a dash of Disney stage-magic and all at once you get a meteor-shower’s worth. Mary Poppins is back in the West End. Incoming at Drury Lane is Frozen. And out on the road, in what must be the most sumptuous-looking touring show of the year, Bedknobs and Broomsticks brings to life a film that has delighted many since its 1971 premiere but has never had its moment of definitive creative realisation.

Too many songs by (Disney stalwarts) the Sherman Brothers hit the cutting-room floor. Composer/lyricist Neil Bartram (working with fellow Canadian Brian Hill, in charge of the book) rectifies this with an earful of 17 numbers. Stand-outs include existing gems like The Beautiful Briny and that colourful knees-up Portobello Road, but rescued ballad Nobody’s Problems and chirpy newcomer Negotiality integrate seamlessly too.

Thanks to the input of illusion specialist Jamie Harrison, co-directing with Candice Edmunds, there’s a welter of wonder-inducing visual trickery too. The story is based on the 1940s children’s books by Mary Norton which involve a bed that serves as a very British answer to a flying carpet and a broomstick wielded by a novice witch, Eglantine Price. The fantastical set-up requires ample lift-off moments fit to make the mind boggle.

This they duly do. The broomstick in question shifts, slides and spins out of Eglantine’s exasperated hands seemingly with a life of its own. When it sends Dianne Pilkington’s stylish but solitary soul soaring about, it has us beaming as delightedly as her. As for the brass bed, it shimmers in technicolour when activated and levitates with a CGI-challenging magnificence not seen since Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. That’s not the half of it: the hands-free coups de theatre are complemented with flourishes in which the ensemble openly manipulate objects, entailing a suspension of disbelief.

That invitation to imagine the impossible is part and parcel of an approach that shows us the locations being briskly concocted – the light, cut-out aesthetic that of a storybook. The required act of shared make-believe chimes with an accentuated emotional theme: these are people in pain, fear and doubt (the Rawlins children, the three evacuees that Eglantine reluctantly takes under her wing, are now orphans). It takes faith for the spells to work; the clear moral is that imagination can help us pull ourselves together, heal.

Seized by a mission to find the rare spell that will enable her to defeat the Germans, Pilkington’s debonair witch has an appealing air of purpose, though lacking Angela Lansbury’s formidability in the film. Combining serenity with sadness, she ensures Eglantine is no Poppins-lite, though she could use a big weepie number.

Since I’m being picky, the evening could also do with emphasising the jeopardy of the German threat, more extravagant characterisation for Eglantine’s erratic purveyor of magical paraphernalia Emelius Browne (twinkly David Tomlinson in the film, here a gangly, diffident Charles Brunton) and a more equal distribution of chatter from the nippers. But these are minor cavils. The fact that it barely matters that the stage show has no match for the film’s memorable animation sequence after the de facto family lands on the animals-only island of Naboombu (here changed to Nopeepo) tells you how much of a triumph this theatrical outing is.

Tour continues to May 1; bedknobsonstage.com