Metaphors of ‘Secret Garden’ remain secret
“The Secret Garden,” a retooled revival of the 1991 Broadway musical based on the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, feels more like homework than a field trip.
The show, presented by Theatre Under The Stars at the Hobby Center through Oct. 22, is about a plucky little orphan girl whose entire family gets killed by cholera and who is then forced to live with her emotionally distant hunchback uncle, though it looks more like he has a lopsided shrug.
Because he’s sad about his dead wife, she has to bring life and joy to this man’s mansion. Meanwhile, everyone is haunted by way too many ghosts, who, on stage as if invisible, stare creepily at the characters who are alive. These ghosts sing in the chorus and help move the scenery. And the titular secret garden, which the orphan girl turns from a pile of dirt into a beautiful landscape of flowers, is, you know, a metaphor for, well, whatever it’s supposed to be a metaphor for.
By the end of this musical, it’s hard to say what is or isn’t symbolic. The ghosts are either real, and this musical is now a Stephen King story, or they’re manifestations of grief. Except the ghosts can kiss people and even use their magical powers on the living.
And is the hunchback uncle looking sadly into the picture of his dead wife supposed to be a metaphor for how annoyingly this man wears his grief ? Is the uncle’s handicapped son regaining his ability to use his legs by way of Indian mystical chants a metaphor for the pervasiveness of offensive cultural appropriation?
In my inquiry for why “The Secret Garden” has Indian characters who are shamanistic snakecharmers that jiggle and wiggle their brown bodies to save spoiled little white children, I came across two theories: The first, either no one in the audience is supposed to realize what’s going on because we’re busy being caught in the transporting, healing, human, universal, uplifting, transcendent magic of Musical Theater, or we’re all too busy fumbling with our Chardonnay-filled, kindergarten-style sippy cups the Hobby sells to patrons who want to drink in their seats.
The second is that this is what theater-makers actually believe people want: more depictions of aristocratic European and European-descent people, more caricatures of everyone else.
Even if the show’s regressive racial component doesn’t ruin the night, the rest of the characters are just as superficially drawn.
To be fair, I recall reading “The Secret Garden” as a child and engaging with Burnett’s subtle approach to imagery. The tangle of wild vines, the chirping bird, the mysterious boy who was kept a secret, the key that unlocked a hidden door — these were powerful images that didn’t need explanation.
Scene after scene shows us that Archibald, the sad uncle, misses his pretty dead wife, but the musical never explores why. Mary doesn’t speak about her entire dead family, yet she’s lorded over by their reanimated bodies, which follow her and peer from behind her back, like Donald Trump during that infamous debate moment. The emotional impact isn’t there.
Jeremy Kushnier tries his best to make the character, the uncle Archibald, broodingly charismatic, though he does it better with his vocal performance than scene work with Bea Corley, who plays a character as cloying all the others: the orphan girl Mary.
Kushnier and Corley sang superbly. So did Julian Lammey, a 10-yearold student at TUTS’ Humphreys School of Musical Theatre, as the secret son Colin. The vocals were altogether more compelling than the production. The music by Lucy Simon (Carly’s sister), though not catchy, made the audience feel something, even if those sentiments were unearned by the story.
The grand sweep at the end, in which the garden is revealed, is emotionally effective staging propelled by Simon’s lyrical, classic movie-soundtrack-style orchestration. The song “A Bit of Earth” also worked as metaphor.
Almost nothing else about this musical did.
So it’s clear TUTS’ season opener is a departure from last year’s “In the Heights,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s story about an immigrant community facing gentrification. The next show on this year’s calendar is a hip-hopinfused Christmas production, which begs the question: Where do we go from here?