Moorestown Theater Company to Perform "Mary Poppins Jr." Pilot

Moorestown, NJ -- The Moorestown Theater Company has been selected to perform yet another pilot, this time by Disney Theatricals.

The Delaware Valley premiere of “Disney’s Mary Poppins Jr.” opens Thursday night at the William Allen Middle School, 801 North Stanwick Road in Moorestown, 7 p.m.

Other performances are Friday night, 7 p.m., Saturday afternoon, 2 p.m., and Saturday night, 7 p.m.

A 55-member cast ranging in age from 6 to 17 years old will perform this Academy Award- and Tony Award-winning musical, which features such memorable characters as “Bert,” “Mr. Banks,” “Mrs. Banks,” “Jane Banks,” “Michael Banks,” “the Bird Lady,” and of course “Mary Poppins.”

Musical numbers include “Chim-Chim-Cheree,” “Practically Perfect,” “Jolly Holiday,” “A Spoonful Of Sugar,” “Feed The Birds,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “Let’s Go Fly A Kite,” and “Step In Time.”

It is the fourth pilot the theater company has been asked to do, and second by Disney Theatrics. All four have been performed since 2010.

A pilot is a show that is not available to all theater companies. Select companies are chosen to perform various versions of the show in what Moorestown Theater Company Artistic Director Mark Morgan calls “an experiment for them to see how to make the show work.”

He compared the process to the pre-Broadway tryout process, where shows would be performed in various cities, and adjusted from city to city before the final cut makes it to Broadway.

“The show might have one song in Philly that gets cut and replaced when it gets to New York,” Morgan said.

There will be four people, including two from Disney Theatrics, in the audience Thursday night, scrutinizing aspects of the show.

Disney asked the theater company to perform the pilot in January, and the company decided to make it the spring production.

For the theater’s first pilot “Camp Rock Jr.,” the cast was told two days before its first performance that one song would be cut and replaced with another.

That hasn’t happened with this show, but the company does have to create everything from scratch, rather than the typical show, where everything is provided.

This show is also slightly easier to prepare because the theater company performed "Mary Poppins" last year. That show included cast members of all ages, although nine of the performers from that cast will also perform in the pilot production.

The other pilots were “Elf Jr.” and “A Ghost Tale for Mr. Dickens Jr.,” both in 2014.

They were all challenges, but also all worth it.

“It’s a huge honor and a wonderful thing,” Morgan said. “ … The best reward is just kids loving musical theater. We have rookies in every show. We have six and seven year olds in this show who are excited that someone from Disney will be in the audience watching them perform. How many people can say that? These are great memories.”

This will be the final pilot production for “Disney’s Mary Poppins Jr.” before the final script is written and the show becomes available for other theater companies to perform.

Tickets are reserved, and can be purchased online at www.MoorestownTheaterCompany.org or at the door 60 minutes before curtain time.

For more information, call MTC at 856-778-8357.

The attached images were provided by the Moorestown Theater Company: Performing in the Moorestown Theater Company's Delaware Valley Premiere of "Disney's Mary Poppins, Jr." are Colin Berkey ('Michael Banks', 11-years-old, Hainesport, NJ), Ali Chesnick ('Mary Poppins', 14, Cherry Hill, NJ), and Miz Zambrano ('Jane Banks', 12, Moorestown, NJ).