"Garden" Opens Slowly but is Worth the Wait
Sacramento Bee
Patience. It takes a scene or two to learn the rules of "The Secret Garden," the glowing and atmospheric musical from
Broadway that is playing the Community Center Theater this week.
Even a familiarity with the source material, Frances Hodgson Burnett's early 20th-century novel, doesn't quite prepare
us. In Burnett's story of an orphan girl sent to live at her grieving uncle's grieving Yorkshire estate, ghosts are of the
reticent, hinted-at variety. They manifest themselves in nature - a gust of wind, a friendly robin, a dream. Playwright
Marsha Norman, by contrast, has layered her entrancing and largely faithful adaptation with a chorus of specters who
walk and waltz and come right out and sing at you. And, oh, what they sing.
Composer Lucy Simon's melodies, influenced a little by English folk music and overlaid here and there with Indian
rhythms, enrich the story without ever emerging from it. If you've had trouble, as we have, warming up to the score on
a recording, the show will open your ears.
The songs, even a rousing number such as "Hold On," sung by Tracy Ann Moore as a wick Yorkshire chambermaid, are
integrated not just with the story, but with every subtle nuance of the wick production. The adjective "wick," by the
way, is Yorkshire for alive, or lively, and it's the title of another spirited (and spiritual) song delivered by Melody Kay as
orphaned Mary and Roger Bart as a rather grown-up version of Dickon, nature-boy of the moors. With patience, you can
even learn a bit of quaint old country-English dialect.
If we resist "The Secret Garden" in its first, dense melodies, it is only because Simon, with librettist-lyricist Norman, is
faithful enough to Burnett that she lets Mary's world be at first a place of muted experience, viewed through the
window of a sour, disappointed child's memory. The opening number depicts a cholera epidemic in colonial India that
wiped out Mary's parents and household. It is played out as a Victorian parlor game, a grim, frantic dance of drop the
handkerchief.
Only designer Heidi Landesman's Tony award-winning, wing and drop set, rich in the busy, fantastic imagery and lush,
muted colors of 19th-century pop-up children's books, hints from the first at the natural wonders that will open up life
at Misselthwaite Manor.
It takes getting used to: Mary's dead parents (her remote father softened for the stage), a ghostly Indian fakir
(ex-Sacramentan Andy Gale), and lovely, departed Aunt Lily (Anne Runolfsson) shadowing the living, playing out
memories that intertwine like garden vines in the minds of Mary, her Uncle Archie (Kevin McGuire) and his invalid son
Colin (Sean Considine). Yet once we have adjusted to the ectoplasmic intimacies, we are entranced.
The liberties Norman has taken are small bows to dramatic and musical need. It is Mary, here, who resembles her dead
aunt. It is doctor's orders, not personal weakness or bitterness, that force Archie to visit Colin only as he sleeps. In this
version, a loving, if inept father may sing "Race You to the Top of the Morning" to his disabled, slumbering child. Stay
clear if you hate to weep in public. Turning Dr. Craven (Douglas Sills) from an incompetent physician to a malicious one
who suffered unrequited love for his late sister in law, has a musical rationale, too. It occasions the operatic male duet,
"Lily's Eyes."
Even the performances in this touring ensemble may take a few scenes to win you. Melody Kay (she alternates with
Kimberly Mahon), with that stilted, colonial, lockjaw accent, never asks the audience to like Mary. We come along in our
own good time. Same goes for Considine (alternate is Luke Hogan). There is no cloying child-acting here. Forget Freddy
Bartholomew in "Little Lord Fauntleroy."
It is ultimately an unexpected joy to come across a big-budget Broadway musical that trusts its audience this
completely. It trusts us to be intelligent, to let the stage world operate by its own Victorian Gothic melodic rules. It
trusts us, above all, to trust it back. And to be patient.
-Peter Haugen, Sacramento Bee
September 3, 1992
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