There’s immense talent among the four women chiefly responsible for The Secret Garden: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman, producer and Tony award-winning set designer Heidi Landesman, rising-star director Susan H. Schulman, Grammy-winning composer Lucy Simon. In the man’s world of Broadway such a collaboration is rare, especially one in which $6.2 million is on the line, putting “The Secret Garden” in a class with all those British blockbusters. But you can’t buy magic, and magic is what an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel must have.
In fact Magic, as Burnett spells it, is practically a character in her 1911 children’s classic that still sells in the hundreds of thousands every year. Magic is the life force that revitalizes Mary (Daisy Eagan), a plain, sad, disagreeable little girl who grew up as a neglected child in British India. When her parents die in a cholera epidemic, she’s transported to the Yorkshire manor of her gloomy, hunchbacked, widowed uncle Archibald (Mandy Patinkin). There Mary discovers a disused garden, and in the course of restoring it works a glorious transformation in herself, her uncle and his bedridden little boy, Colin (John Babcock). Burnett gave her story diverse elements: Gothic novel, poetic pastoral, muscular Christian self-help, even sexual symbolism. Norman’s book is effective when it sticks close to Burnett. But there’s that big budget, 6.2 million demons shrieking for gewgaws to encumber a translucent tale that doesn’t need Freud-Schmeud, Jung-Schmung symbolism grafted onto it.
So this earthy fable expands into the sham heavens of Broadway. The exotic Indian element is too much to resist, and all evening we’re treated to the recurring presence of white-clad phantoms including Mary’s parents, her nurse, or ayah, several British officers and even a turbaned, chanting fakir. Norman also supplies Archibald with a brother, Neville (Robert Westenberg), a physician in charge of Colin. In Norman’s scheme Neville was in love with his brother’s wife, Lily, another phantom (Rebecca Luker), whose death has left Archie in despair. This unrequited love is pure Broadway boilerplate but leads to a big number, “Lily’s Eyes,” a duet in which each brother sees Lily in little Mary.
As with Norman’s book and lyrics, Simon’s score is most effective when it sticks to Burnett’s themes, as in “There’s a Girl,” which evokes Mary’s profound loneliness, and “Wick,” in which Mary learns about growing things from Dickon (John Cameron Mitchell), a sort of domesticated Heathcliff. The best thing about Simon’s music isn’t so much individual songs, but an overall emotional quality rare on Broadway, a pure yearning for life and joy.
Landesman’s basic design idea is lovely–a Victorian toy theater that embraces the entire proscenium. But, astonishingly, she blows her chief assignment–the secret garden. As the first-act curtain falls Mary is about to enter the long-dead garden, a true moment of suspense. At the rise of the second-act curtain we see–not a garden at all, but still another dream-space filled with those white-clad phantoms. This mistaken choice to shun the thrilling simplicity of the garden for more dreambound symbolism is compounded later on when the moment comes to see the revived, blooming garden that has brought new life to all the wounded characters. Again Landesman gives us not a true garden but an assemblage of cutout figures that are just an extension of the basic design we’ve seen all evening. Here’s where some of that 6.2 million could have done something creative: the show’s lighting wizard, Tharon Musser, could have painted a magical transformation, turning the gray tangle of the dead garden into an Eden blazing with green leaves and crimson blossoms.
Schulman’s best work is in the simpler scenes-Mary goading the bed-mired Colin into action, the chambermaid Martha (Alison Fraser) dispensing Yorkshire wisdom to Mary. But Schulman and choreographer Michael Lichtefeld can’t make those phantom-clogged dream scenes into anything more than fancy traffic jams, with past and present, dead and living obscuring the issue and smothering the pleasure. The freshness of the younger performers makes the most impact-Eagan’s Mary does seem to turn from a pinched bud into a flower, Babcock’s Colin changes from a hysterical mini-tyrant into a kid crazy with joy. This is really two shows, a touching setting of a classic fable, overlaid with a stifling sophistication that turns an enchanting garden into a Broadway hothouse.
