The shell of a large doll house superimposed on a child’s face and hanging from the flies dominates the stage at the St. James Theater, where “The Secret Garden” is playing. The face resembles that of Daisy Eagan, who plays Mary Lennox in this lovely and evocative musical version of the children’s book by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Elsewhere on Heidi Landesman’s set—a replica of a child’s toy cardboard-and-cutout theater—rose-lipped lads and lasses peer out from bowers crowded with Edwardian images of childhood: dolls, toys, masks, puppets, birds, baby animals, flowers, butterflies, bits of eyelet lace. The doll house is more austere. Most of its rooms are empty, and those that aren’t are filled largely with objects that have no place in a child’s nursery: elegant pieces of furniture in miniature, mantelpiece ornaments (a highly breakable-looking model schooner, a glass ball of some sort)—things a child would be chased away from and told not to touch. The only modern image on the set is the face behind the doll house, which we see a fuller version of on one of the panels to the right of the stage. It’s modern because the child seems unaware of our presence: rather than focusing on us or interacting with another child or staring dreamily at nothing at all, she is looking down at something that absorbs her attention: she has a pen and a bottle of ink and is intent on a project of some sort.
The idea of the child as an independent agent—capable of moral autonomy and of being desirous of something other than adult approval—is one of the things that “The Secret Garden” gave to the world of children’s literature, and the first time I saw the show (I’ve seen it twice) I remember being astonished that a Broadway musical should pick up on this. In fact, a good deal about “The Secret Garden” is surprising: it’s quiet, charming, subtle, intelligent, and wholly literary in its approach to adaptation. Watching it, I found myself wondering how anything produced on the commercial stage could be so tasteful, so utterly on the mark, and thinking, Well, of course, they’re women. “The Secret Garden,” which sneaked into town with almost no noise or publicity, is a show put together almost entirely by women: Lucy Simon wrote the music, Marsha Norman the book and lyrics; Susan Schulman directed, and Ms. Landesman (in addition to designing the set, is the show’s principal producer. Theoni V. Aldredge designed the costumes and Tharon Musser the lighting. (Ms. Landesman is also the show’s principal producer.)
Men, putting together a musical about a little orphan girl (think of “Annie”), would probably have gone straight for the big money, peopling the stage with Broadway brats and musical-comedy stars. Men adapting this book for the stage would probably have kept zapping us with horticultural spectacle. Only women would have constructed a show around the device of not showing us the garden until the last possible moment. Only women would have mounted a production in which Mandy Patinkin, Alison Fraser, Rebecca Luker, and Robert Westenberg appeared without “billing,” simply as part of an ensemble. And only women would have seen that to cast a conventional child star—or any young actress more mannered or self-conscious than Miss Eagan—in the role of Burnett’s unprepossessing heroine would have been the death of her story.
A desentimentalizing of childhood was one of the things that made “The Secret Garden” revolutionary for its time. In that regard, it’s the girl’s-book equivalent of “Huckleberry Finn.” Unlike Huck, though, nasty, selfish Mary and her even nastier and more selfish cousin, Colin, are not initially likable—not even remotely. What “The Secret Garden” did that was so unheard of was to introduce the idea of juvenile temperament without making it an object of moral judgment or correction. It made a virtue out of disobedience and aggression. If Mary is redeemed and transformed by her obsession with a mysterious walled garden and her contact with a child even ruder and more unattractive than herself, it is only because her utter imperviousness to authority allows her to find them.
Burnett, who also wrote “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” had herself actually helped to create the “beautiful-child” cult that the figure of Mary Lennox was a reaction to; and the last portion of the book lapses into a mawkish piety that even its most ardent admirers tend to disavow. Which is why one is glad that the show at the St. James is not slavish in its approach to adaptation. It’s less faithful to the spirit of the book than to its place in our culture and consciousness. Some characters have been altered or omitted; others, like Colin’s scheming uncle (Mr. Westenberg) and dead mother (a sort of Lilac Fairy figure, played by Miss Luker), have been given greater prominence. The reclusive Mr. Craven (played here by Mr. Patinkin) has been transformed into a somewhat less benighted parent and guardian; the acerbity of the crotchety old gardener, Ben Weatherstaff (Tom Toner), has been transferred to Dickon, the Yorkshire peasant boy so hopelessly idealized in the book, played here with grace, command, and a kind of dry diffidence by John Cameron Mitchell. Mary and Colin, meanwhile, have been brought more in line with our perception of unpleasant children as unhappy rather than unmannerly. Thus, Miss Eagan’s performance is characterized by stillness rather than sourness, while her colleague John Babcock, who plays Colin so unaffectedly, makes one think less of imperiousness than vulnerability.
In general, the impulse seems to have been toward a notion of storytelling more in keeping with the modern children’s book tradition that “The Secret Garden” helped to usher in. It’s as though Mrs. Landesman and her creative team, in adapting a cherished and slightly dated book, yried to make something out of its flaws. What they’ve fashioned is in part a comment on the particular moment in time that produced “The Secret Garden.” A daguerreotype of that Mary carries around with her (it drives the plot along) is pure invention, for example, as is the number that begins Act II—a birthday picnic that we gradually come to realize must be a dream, as the clusters of people posing for a photograph could never have met. It’s the vocabulary of psychoanalysis—memory, dream, desire—captured by the medium of nostalgia and regret.
Throughout the play, spirits from the past converge or make ghostly passages across the stage, replaying scenes and conversations from long ago—an ayah (Patricia Phillips), an Indian fakir (Peter Marinos), elegant officers and ladies who waltz prettily around the stage like music-box figures. It’s mood-painting rather than exposition, and it’s all done with tremendous attention to detail: everyone in the ensemble, which is led by Kay Walbye and Michael De Vries, as the ghosts of Mary’s parents, looks and sounds just right, which may in part be owing to the fact that the dialect coach (Barbara Rosenblatt) is there onstage playing the role of the housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock. The only glitch in the whole fabric is Mr. Patinkin, who, alone of the company, seems out of context in the Edwardian setting and continually draws attention to himself. One wishes that someone had tactfully explained to him the difference between being uninvolved (as Mr. Craven is supposed to be) and seeming self-involved, and also explained that “The Secret Garden” is a story about a little girl, not a story about her uncle.
Miss Schulman’s staging is not ignorant of Balanchine and Robbins, just as Miss Simon’s music, though it draws on nursery and folk tradition (and a certain amount of seventies pop, for Dickon), is not ignorant of Britten or Sondheim. It knows that two men singing an emotive duet (an idea Sondheim imported to the Broadway stage from opera) can provide moments of great power and beauty—moments that justify the invented plot twist that makes the duet possible. Best of all, perhaps, is the way Ms. Landesman’s set seems to acknowledge “The Secret Garden” as a product of the Edwardian era’s twilight. There are images on the proscenium arch that might or might not allude to impending modernity. A picture painted on the backdrop could be somebody’s model train set or a railway disaster; a figure too frightening to be a toy soldier makes one think of the Great War—and the whole finale is a farewell to the spirit world. As the ghosts wave to Miss Eagan and drift offstage, one by one, we know that part of what Mary is saying goodbye to is a charmed Victorian world—a nostalgia for which is part of what makes this book, with all its imperfections, so beloved by us.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, May 13, 1991