As a child, reading "The Secret Garden" for the first time, I was awed by the bravery of Mary Lennox. There she was, newly orphaned and shipped from India to live with an uncle she didn't know in his lonely old mansion on the wild moors of England. Then she hears wailing in the night. Then she gets up to investigate.
That was the amazing part. Mary is only a child, but she is unafraid to face the ghosts.Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon must have been struck by that aspect of "The Secret Garden" as well. They wrote a musical based on the novel, a play in which the past keeps pulling at the characters, making them sad and fearful. Luckily an orphan girl comes along to show the others how to be brave enough to really live.
The Pioneer Theatre Company's production of "The Secret Garden" is a hauntingly pretty little play. The music is lush. The garden blooms. The sky seems endless. And the ghosts are everywhere, adding their harmonies to the voices of the living.
It is always a bit scary for the audience when the main character is a child. We want her to do well, but we don't want her to be so "cute" as to remind us we are watching a little actress. Fortunately, director Michael Montel understands what restraint is required when dealing with the role of plucky orphan. As Mary Lennox, 11-year-old Emily Jane Stewart, is skilled. She's wide-eyed and dramatic, but not overly so. She also has a strong singing voice.
Quite a few of the voices are beautiful. Take Victoria Mallory who plays the part of the ghost of Lily Craven. Especially electrifying is the duet she sings at the end with Michael Greenwood - who plays Archibald, the man who desperately misses her. Their passion is palpable. It adds a new level of significance to what was a relatively minor theme in the book and movie.
Unlike the book, the theater version of "The Secret Garden" focuses as much on the world of adults as of children. Not only is Archibald haunted by Lily's memory, but Archibald's brother, too, was in love with Lily. Neville Craven is played by Kim Moore as a complicated man. He is occasionally kind, but more often controlling. Burt Edwards plays a good-hearted gardner. Margaret Crowell is a no-nonsense housekeeper. Dorothy Briggs Arnold is a headmistress who comes to visit Mary Lennox, thereby giving Stewart the chance to prove herself quite the comedienne as she stomps and rails away at poor Arnold.
Kirk McDonald plays Dickon the Yorkshire boy who roams the moors, befriending animal and orphan alike. Scott Fetzer is Colin Craven, the invalid who learns to walk. Fetzer is in high school and McDonald just graduated from college, so they are not really child actors. Still they bring coltish exhuberance to their roles. Nancy Anderson plays Martha, a servant girl who is Dickon's older sister.
One of the most interesting scenes in the play is one in which Anderson, McDonald and Stewart sing and dance around Fetzer as if they are casting a spell. The scene is made richer and more complex by the presence of the ghosts in the background. They mimic the actions of the living - or perhaps the living mimic them.
In other scenes, the garden takes part in the dance of life. Huge trellises on wheels glide back and forth in rhythm. On opening night, unfortunately, one of them kept sticking. It didn't seem that he was supposed to be left on stage while all his fellow trellises waltzed off? The chorus of ghosts (the playwright calls them "dreamers") is quite an effective dramatic tool. The ghosts are a constant eerie presence. They are not always benign, as in the scenes wherein they drape scarves around their necks and the necks of the children. The scarves seem like an invitation to join them in death.
The chorus is made up of veteran voices, including the likes of Robert Peterson. It is quite moving to watch them dance the last waltz of their lives and to hear them echo the living, "I am lost." Still we hope for these ghosts to lose their power and we are glad at the end of the play when the living are pulled into the garden. Finally, they can be fully in the present, be free.