Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins needs a world that can feel warm and domestic one moment, then completely impossible the next. The challenge is that the magic cannot feel tacked on. The house itself needs to participate in the illusion.

I designed the Banks family home as a permanent onstage structure that could hide major locations and effects inside its architecture. Rather than relying on full scene changes, the house opened,…

Mary Poppins needs a world that can feel warm and domestic one moment, then completely impossible the next. The challenge is that the magic cannot feel tacked on. The house itself needs to participate in the illusion.

I designed the Banks family home as a permanent onstage structure that could hide major locations and effects inside its architecture. Rather than relying on full scene changes, the house opened, rotated, lifted, and pushed forward to reveal the next space.

The office was designed as a pie-shaped room with two six-foot-wide, eight-foot-tall walls, hinged at the corner so it could swing out from the house like a door. The nursery was a twelve-by-twelve-foot room that pushed forward when the exterior walls opened as barn doors. Its back wall included a doorway and concealed mechanism for Mary’s bed appearance.

The front entrance concealed another major transformation. The front door was hinged at the top and lifted upward, allowing a staircase and fireplace unit to push out from the house. That unit was constructed from two rolling four-by-eight platforms with added legs, stairs, railings, and fireplace detailing, giving the production a practical and repeatable transformation from exterior to interior.

Because I have consulted on 18 Off-Broadway productions of Mary Poppins, I approached the scenic design with an understanding of how the show’s effects, timing, choreography, and audience expectations need to work together. In addition to the set, I created the practical effects package and constructed most of the effects myself. Some were purely mechanical, while others incorporated automation, including a motorized breaking-table effect.

The final design was built to make each reveal feel magical while still remaining structurally practical, repeatable, and integrated into the visual world of the show.