The Creative Garden

By Jerry Stein

Greatness is such a rare visitor to the stage--any stage--that when it does appear it is often relegated to the shadows of the mainstream of theater seldom seen, often missed.

But director/choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge's production of "The Secret Garden," which opened Thursday night (9/10) at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, struts.

It brandishes achievement among music, lyrics, book, extraordinary singers, sets, costuming, direction and puppetry smack in the middle of commercial theater.

This 1991 musical, with music by Lucy Simon and lyrics/book from Marsha Norman (" 'night, Mother"), tells the story of Mary Lennox (a spirited Caitlin Cohn) who is shipped off from British Colonial India to
Edwardian England, when cholera plays deadly with her parents' intestines.

Mary comes down with what might be called the "Wuthering Heights Syndrome": You know young governess-bride-or in this case--the 10-year-old Mary-- finds herself in a brooding house in Yorkshire overseen by and even more gloomy maternal uncle Archibald Craven (a powerful, clarion-voiced Kevin Earley).

Archie's wife Lily (Brandi Burkhardt, a lovely ghost with a lilting soprano voice) has died in childbirth. Archie isn't exactly father-of-the-year. He resents his son Colin (Anthony Frederickson) and keeps him up in a bed chamber. The boy is so isolated he has gotten it into his head that he is going to die.

Mary fares no better with Archie. He comes to think Mary looks too much like Lily and takes off for Paris. He leaves her in the care of his conflicted brother Neville (Adam Monley, yet another wonderful, dramatic singer) who is revealed to be quite psychologically complex.

Neville is the most interesting character in the musical. But to say more about him would lessen the dramatic surprise. Discover for yourself.

The charming subplot is Mary's relationship with her sickly but combative cousin Colin (Frederickson, something of a wildcat in bathrobe). Mary has a healing effect on Colin through involving him in restoring Lily's secret garden. Children in the audience, who have siblings and cousins, should find joyous identification with their rowdy confrontations.

If there are mists of melodrama in "Secret Garden" to rival the fog swirling outside on the moors, Burnett is simply not enamored of these heightened pulls of emotions as a matter of period conventions. She comes by this proclivity for melancholia legitmately from her own life. She filtered much of her experiences into "The Secret Garden."

As a girl, Burnett was poor. She wanted to write but couldn't afford clean paper so she inserted her writing in the spaces around the script already present on used paper.

Burnett also lost a child, had a first marriage that ended in divorce and, like Mary, loved to garden.

Still, no matter how authentic the emotional source as a basis of Burnett's story, the sentimentality found in the book and especially on stage cannot be overly mitigated because most of it comes from real life. Remember the stage, because of our attentive focus on it, magnifies everything from life especially emotions. So the answer to keeping the largeness of life in scale on the stage is to make it smaller.

The triumph of director Dodge's production is that through the skillful employment of a varied set of theatrical elements melodrama is kept on a short leash.

This is thankfully achieved, in part, by Marsha Norman's script that uses brisk inserts of humor. The comedy is used as a mop to soak up the periodic melodramatic puddles that form frequently in Burnett's literary garden.

Even more significant is Dodge's transition of the original musical that was rooted, if not totally, in realism to a completely surreal interpretation. This dreamlike ambience is quite hospitable to the recurring surges of emotion.

In support of Dodge's surreal conception is Narelle Sissons' set. It uses huge, multi-level stacks of pages from a book as a playing platform. In addition, large hand-written pages are mounted on upstage curtains above the playing area. This spartan playing space provides and airiness that allows the intensity of emotions a much needed escape vent.

A more appointed set would have allowed the emotional textures to hover and seem much more overwrought in the confines of realistic libraries and sitting rooms.

The only visual disappointment is that when the garden finally blooms a few paper roses unfold that do not quite warrant the jubilant reaction of the characters witnessing it.

Further relief from melodrama comes in the back story that occasional revisits, through Mary's memories, her days back in India. There are Indian figures (Anita Vasan and Vishal Vaidya) who poetically intrude with Indian song, dance and once, quite dramatically, cavort with a group of huge scary-looking pole puppets.

Lucy Simon's music has a compelling shift of moods. There is the ominousnes of the choral "The House Upon the Hill" reminiscent of Sondheim's ballad of "Sweeney Todd."

Earley's songs offer him an opportunity to display his impressive range from the powerful duet "Lily's Eyes" he sings with an equally intense Adam Monley to the lullaby "Race to the Top of the Morning" he sings to Colin. Here, he easily climbs to a sweet falsetto.

There are more moving musical moments: A wrenching duet "How Could I Ever Know" from Lily and Archibald over death's interruption of their happiness. Frederickson's piping out of Colin's "Round-Shouldered Man" and Mary conjuring her Indian mysticism in the pulsating "Come Spirit, Come Charm" with its angular choreographic moves.

The supporting cast adds immeasurably: Charlotte Maltby's friendly, funny chambermaid to Mary; a plucky Cameron Bartell as an estate gardener who seems part leprechaun. And Carlyn Connolly's martinet of a headmistress who is foiled in her attempts to carry Mary off to a boarding school.

So, "The Secret Garden" does get down to being that rare event in musical theater when the elements of production, performance, music and words, cease trying to best each other to dominate a show. Instead, a kind of peace is declared among these creative forces so that they can blend into a harmonious whole. The resulting union created is a definition of greatness on the stage.

Rick Steiner, one of the producers of the Broadway production of "The Secret Garden," which won three Tony Awards itself, also recognized the exceptionalism of Dodge's production by telling me early on during the intermission "it's better than what we did."

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The Secret Garden, Thursday night at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Marx Theatre, Mt. Adams, Cincinnati, Ohio, through Oct. 3. Disclosure: The reviewer received complimentary tickets to view this production.
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Photo captions: Caitlin Cohn, above right, as Mary Lennox, finds the key to the "The Secret Garden."

Kevin Earley, as Archibald, and Brandi Burkhardt, as Lily, lower left, travel across time to sing the duet "How Could I Ever Know."

Photos by Mikki Schaffner.
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