Yes, "Mary Poppins" was too long. The show time was 7:30 pm and Mark and I were surprised when we got in the car afterwards and the clock read 9:52 pm. We were going to try to find a little taco stand on Thousand Oaks Blvd. called Bad Ass Tacos, so we headed down the boulevard towards home, but when it was obvious we were going in the wrong direction, I didn't bother to turn around, as I was sure it would be closed by then.
My other issue with the show was that I couldn't hear the spoken lines or the lyrics very well, as it was all drowned out by the orchestra. There was quite a bit of spoken dialog that would come in the middle of a song, and since it was in the middle of a song, the orchestra never stopped playing. Albeit they played softly, but I still missed all the funny lines (of which there weren't that many). Add to that the fact that half the dialog was spoken by children who don't really know how to project and the rest spoken in English accents made the whole thing hard to understand. The actor who played Bert was quite good (he was loud enough anyway) and Juliana Hansen did a lovely job, of course.
