Each spring, hit Broadway shows look forward to the arrival of their new costumes; in recent years, the arrival of the costumes has been especially inspiring. They have been as exciting as anything on the stage and have often generated buzz about the new show itself.

In 2012, this excitement was inspired by “Mary Poppins,” which is a musical about nanny and all-purpose magician Michael Banks. The costume for Michael, the nanny, was designed by the costume designer, who is a legend in Broadway circles: Eiko Ishioka. An article about the first production of “Mary Poppins” in 1964 described how she had “transmogrified her ideas into a wardrobe that would enable an actor to start out in an old shirt and end up with a T-shirt.”

The new musical “Eight,” which is playing at Lincoln Center Theater and directed by Doug Hughes, is another show where the original costume designer played a crucial role in shaping the story. This time her name is Stephanie J. Block, and she designed the costumes for its original production at Second Stage Theater in 2009. Her work helped create a sense of place that has now become part of our cultural consciousness.

The original movie was a big deal. It was the first feature film to win an Academy Award and the first to use color footage. However, it also made the transition from movie to stage with some help from Broadway veterans such as costume designer Ann Roth and director Sydney Pollack.

The most obvious difference is that in no other recent Broadway musical has so much of the original story been changed. Some roles have been eliminated, others expanded; the names of towns and streets have been changed, and many characters renamed. In one case, Mary’s former husband has disappeared entirely.

This is not necessarily a bad thing: Everything in “Mary Poppins” is up for grabs, including songs and even plot details. But it does mean that the current stage version doesn’t offer quite the same experience as watching the movie on a big screen, where events unfold at a steady pace.

It’s hard to say whether the Broadway suit is better than the movie one, but it is certainly more original. I think the Broadway version looks stylistically more distinct, and that’s because there’s no other show on the planet that wears a dress with a hat. In the movies, it’s not just the costume but also the performance that is inspired by Mary Poppins: Julie Andrews’ singing voice, her style of dancing, and her emphasis on magic–meaning she doesn’t talk about it as much as Mary Poppins does in the books. There’s nothing wrong with a musical being different from its source material, but films are more like books than musicals are.

Although a lot of people complain about Julie Andrews’ singing voice sounding too “high”, I think it sounds fine. She has a pleasant contralto voice (if you don’t count the opera), and she was trained in acting before she got into show business. Being able to express yourself vocally can be useful for an actor as well as for a singer or a poet, and Julie Andrews’ voice is expressive enough for me to feel transported into her world.

Ten years ago, when the movie version of Mary Poppins was released, I was working at a theater in New York City. The director of the show and I were talking about some changes we wanted to make, and I mentioned that Mary Poppins had always been a costume designer, not a singer. She said, “Well, she’s always been a nanny, right? And nannies don’t sing.”

I know what she meant. When you see Mary Poppins on stage today, she still looks like a nanny. But that’s partly because she is also a re-imagining of another character: Bert the chimney sweep. In her first incarnation, Bert was more of a clown than he was in the movie; he was played by Dick Van Dyke (and his real name was Richard Vernon Van Voorst).

In the movie Bert was an old man who went back to work on the chimney stack after his wife died. The Broadway Bert is much younger and much more energetic than that; he’s played by David Hyde Pierce (and his real name is David Alan Perry).

The reason for this change is simple enough: David Hyde Pierce is much funnier than Dick Van Dyke ever was.

If you’re going to do a stage version of a movie, there are a few things you need to know. One is that in the theatre the costume designer needs to make the costumes match what’s on screen. That means if you see Marlene Dietrich at the beginning of the film wearing a long coat, you have to do that costume on stage – or else at least get close enough.

There are other constraints. The film was made in 1959, but Broadway is a different place. If you’ve ever been to Broadway you’ll understand why we say so. The show I’m thinking about is Mary Poppins. And I want to tell you about the difference between Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins on Broadway; with songs and everything.

First of all, the film is from 1964. By then, Broadway had already had three years’ experience of having an American musical based on a British film – and three years’ experience of what not to do about it. So when I went to see Mary Poppins last year I knew what I was going to see: something that wasn’t done right, because it hadn’t been done right before.

I was wrong, though; it was very intriguing indeed! But like every successful adaptation,

The next morning, my daughter and I went to see Mary Poppins.

During the first act, a different set of actors played Bert and Jane Banks, characters who appeared in the movie but not in the stage show. In the movie they are played by Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews. We have seen them many times in other stage shows. They are famous; their names are on the marquee outside.

But when Mary Poppins comes on stage to sing “A Spoonful of Sugar,” there is no one from the movie to play Bert and Jane Banks. Instead, there is a host of new characters: Bert’s wife Jane (pronounced with an accent), his daffy sister Clara, his cold-as-ice brother Harry, his sweet sister Bessie (also known as “the baby”), and his mild-mannered nephew Timmy. In the movie they all played different roles such as Bert’s sister Bessie or Timmy’s friend Teddy. But here they are all together, performing one song and then saying good night while they leave the theater to go home to bed.

The effect is not unlike that of giving a very famous actor some lines in a foreign language he has never heard before in a room full of

The most striking difference between the movie and the stage versions of Mary Poppins has to do with the costumes, since so many people remember them from the movie.

In the movie version of Mary Poppins, the lamplighter was an ordinary street person; in the Broadway version he is a character named Bert. In the movie version, Mary’s nanny is an ordinary young woman; in the stage version she is a character named Emily.

Mary Poppins’ hat in both versions, designed by Mary Martin (who won an Oscar for her role), is a design that can be traced back to various 16th-century hats. Some of them were called “Mary” or “Mare” hats, after Queen Mary I of England.

The character Jane Banks, who appears only in song and dance numbers in the movie and never at all on stage, was played by two different actresses. In the movie she is performed by Julie Andrews; in the stage production she is played by Ruthie Henshall.

The robot Mr. Dawes was originally performed by Dick Van Dyke on stage but not in the film; he was played by David Tomlinson on film but not on stage.*

* This article includes references to specific musical performances