Caroline Sheen plays the title role in Mary Poppins, which opens this week at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa. Sheen, 34, is from Wales and was in the original casts of Mamma Mia! and The Witches of Eastwick in London’s West End. Now she has a new CD out, Raise the Curtain (SimG Records).

Her aim on the disc is to introduce relatively unknown musical theater repertoire, and she has chosen interesting material from some British songwriters that American listeners are not likely to know. I especially enjoyed Carrie Makes a Decision, a peppy ode to ambivalence by Grant Olding,, and Isn’t This What Every Woman Wants?, a song by Dana P. Rowe (music) and John Dempsey (lyrics) cut from The Witches of Eastwick, the musical from a John Updike novel.

Sheen’s voice range is mezzo-soprano, but basically she is a Broadway belter who can sell big, extroverted numbers like Conor Mitchell’s jazzy What Did You Want From Love? with plenty of flair. In 2009, she played Clara in a British production of Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza, and her rendition of the title song is a shimmering treat

The recording features one selection from Mary Poppins, the musical’s homage to free thinkers everywhere, Anything Can Happen, written by George Stiles (music) and Anthony Drewe (lyrics) to complement the Sherman brothers’ familiar songs from the movie. Accompanied by piano, she sings it quite differently from how it’s done in the show. Sheen and her husband, fellow actor Michael Jibson, give a wonderfully droll performance of Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True, a hilarious duet from David Yazbek’s score for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Raise the Curtain is sold for $20 at the Straz Center and at Sheen's Web site.