'Mary Poppins' Comes To Broadway

Stage Adaptation Starring 24-Year-Old Ashley Brown Is 'Darker' Than 1960s Movie

(CBS)  After more than 40 years, "Mary Poppins" is still one of Disney's most beloved movies.

Now the stage adaptation has reached the Great White Way.

The musical stars Ashley Brown who, at a mere 24, is undertaking the role of a lifetime and following in the footsteps of a legend.

"I loved the movie, and I loved Julie Andrews," Brown told The Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm at Broadway's New Amsterdam Theater. "She was so beautiful and somebody I always looked up to."

When Storm reminded Brown that Andrews won an Oscar for her performance, Brown chuckled, "I know. I try not to think about it. It's a little too much pressure!"

Just two years ago, Brown was still performing in college, albeit at Cincinnati's prestigious College-Conservatory of Music. After graduation, she was offered the lead role in Disney's touring production of "On the Record." Her Broadway debut came last year as Belle in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast."

Brown says those roles "made me grow up in a hurry, and this didn't seem so big a monster to me, having those two steppingstones."

"Although this is huge," Storm interjected.

"Yes," Brown conceded, adding she watched the movie "so many times. I knew all the words. My favorite song was 'Feed the Birds.' I still love that song."

While many of film's classic songs are reprised on Broadway, the musical isn't a complete reproduction of the movie.

"The show has a bit more of the books in it," Brown observes. "And the books are a little darker."

The original Mary Poppins books, by the late P.L. Travers, were darker, without much of the so-called Disney magic.

Travers called the movie "saccharine."

"The Mary Poppins of the movie was too sweet and rosy for her," Storm noted.

How is Brown's Poppins different?

"I think just the way, the sternness she is with the children," brown responded. "She has a lot of heart for them. And she loves them, but she's mysterious, and has to be different from any other nanny and she has to keep them on their toes."

"So," Storm asked, "for people who are expecting penguins and nannies flying through the air and kids jumping into paintings, they are not really going to see things they are familiar with in the movie?"

"Oh," Brown quipped, "we've got stuff better than that!"

"Such as toys that come to life," Storm said.

"Yeah, it's great," Brown replied.

The musical opened on London's West End nearly two years ago and has enjoyed both record audiences and promising reviews, including a thumbs-up from none other than Andrews, who even joined the London cast for a curtain call.

"It has done very well in London," Storm said. "Do you think it will do as well in America with fans who are so attached to the movie?"

"I think so," was Brown's quick reply. "I think they are just going to love it. You actually hear gasps sometimes when people are so surprised and you hear sniffles and you hear kids laughing, and if you can get a kid to laugh that's your biggest critic right there. When you hear a child's belly laugh, there is nothing more rewarding than that."

If initial reviews are any indication, Brown could be right.

New York's Daily News calls the musical "a roof-raising, toe-tapping, high-flying extravaganza," and the New York Post writes that, "'Mary Poppins' doesn't simply translate — it transcends."