Supercalifr Agilistic Lin- Manuel Miranda!

He sings! He dances! He writes Tony-winning musicals and Oscar-nominated scores! And now he’s starring in Mary Poppins Returns! As BRUCE HANDY writes, there’s no such thing as just a spoonful of …

The first image you see in Mary Poppins Returns is a gas flame dancing in an oldfashioned street lamp, just before dawn. It’s an apt way to start the movie, which, more than half a century later, means to rekindle the spirit of Walt Disney’s 1964 adaptation of the P. L. Travers children’s books. Some would argue (well, I would) that the original Mary Poppins is the greatest of Walt Disney pictures—Disney, the actual man and studio head—so that crafting a sequel is a Herculean and possibly foolish task. Blame or salute director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Into the Woods), screenwriter David Magee (Life of Pi), and songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray). But here we are.

The second thing you see in Mary Poppins Returns is a close-up of Lin-Manuel Miranda, tending the flame literally and figuratively as a Cockney lamplighter named Jack. Those of us happy just to have had tickets in the rear balcony when we saw Hamilton, the epochal hip-hop musical Miranda wrote and starred in on Broadway, or In the Heights, his first show and the rare Broadway hit with Latin music actually written by Latinos, may not have realized how expressive his big brown eyes are, especially on a movie screen. Here, with his face shorn of its customary beard and mustache, those eyes, no longer counterbalanced by whiskers, look almost ridiculously, Keane-ian large. They’ve been unleashed, like a pair of excited puppies—adorable and up for anything. In tandem with the gaslight, they seem meant to welcome us into the magical, innocent, sentimental world of Mary Poppins Returns, and they give us the first hint that this thing might work.