Opera NUOVA’s Secret Garden blooms in dark musical at Festival Place
Many remember Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved 1911 novel The Secret Garden as a great read from their childhood. It’s about a hidden garden that flowers and brings new life to all who enter.
A new production of the Lucy Simon (music) and Marsha Norman (book & lyrics) 1991 musical from Edmonton’s Opera NUOVA – in Sherwood Park’s Festival Place until June 30 – is not the book you remember. Although it may still appeal to younger viewers, the duo of Norman and Simon turned the story dark. It’s still moving, filled with great songs and ends with palpable uplift, but the sun takes a long time to shine in this tangled garden.
Set in Victorian Times, it tells the story of the neglected English schoolgirl Mary Lennox (Hayley Stacey), who is living with her parents in India. When a cholera epidemic sweeps the country, Mary’s mother and father are victims. They leave Mary – who is haunted by a Greek chorus of souls who sing to her – to be sent to a dreary Gothic mansion on the bleak moors of Yorkshire.
The sepulchral chorus intones, “It’s a big old house and there’s something wrong inside…” The master of the house is her uncle Archibald Craven (Zainen Suzuki), a recluse who spends his time mourning the death of his beloved wife Lily (Christina Thanisch-Smith) a decade before, and who haunts the evening as a ghostly presence. Archibald’s brother Dr. Neville Craven (Justin Kautz) harbours a secret love for Archie’s wife.
Mary wanders the ghost-ridden old house – at times hearing the voice of a little boy crying somewhere in the darkness. Brrrrrr!
The only positive influences are Martha (Brenley Palmer), a cheery local lass; and a sunny gardener Dickon (Brent Raddall). It’s a wonder Mary manages to reserve any of her spark at all – but she does, wandering about the house endeavouring to find out where the mysterious, weeping boy can be hiding. She discovers Archie’s son Colin (Adam Skogstad), who is kept locked away because he may be dying. Mary uses a discovered key to open a door to the secret garden, neglected, overgrown and off-limits, that her aunt loved in her lifetime.
The garden brings the household to life as Mary, Colin and Dickon tend the withered blooms.
“There’s a lot of things that look dead,” observes Dickon, “But they’re just bidin’ their time.”
Dickon, something of a wizard himself, summons the restorative power of nature to bring the garden back, and Mary turns to her ghosts to help her return to new life as well. Even Uncle Archie is not impervious to the growth around him, and discovers the heart of his son, and the little girl he has ignored, and begins to finds peace with the shade of his lost love.
Opera NUOVA is in the midst of their annual mini-festival which includes operas, cabarets and concerts. As they proved with their vibrant production of Into the Woods last year, their musicals are not operatic in production but fully-fledged celebrations of Broadway, with high spirits, sumptuous sets, supportive orchestras and full-bore vocal delivery. The Secret Garden is no less elegant. Simon’s music is morose when called for while at other times it soars.
The production is directed by Kim Mattice Wanat. Her staging is expert, creating just the right tone and atmosphere for a ghost story, and a fine balance between the semi-operatic score and the dramatic thrust of the book. Forgoing any temptation to recreate the mouldering mansion on the moor she (with designers Guido Tondino and Victoria Zimski) placed a large curving wall at the back (which opens and closes) and inhabits the stage with a series of half cylinders that trundle about on wheels to combine into just about anything the director wants. They are semi-opaque and the shades of the dead, past and present, are eerily lit from inside.
The cast is obviously well-trained (Opera NUOVA is a training institution) and members have no problem switching from a semi-operatic voice to a bold Broadway sound. They act as well as they sing, generally nailing the Yorkshire accent. Suzuki has a supple tenor and his pain is evident throughout. As Neville, Kautz gives a restrained but chilling reading as the seething jealous brother. The two deliver a knockout duet with Lilly’s Eyes, and Suzuki gives full vocal and dramatic credence to the heart rending solo Race You to the Top of the Morning – in which he reads stories about dragons to his sleeping son because he can’t bring himself to embrace the child. Palmer’s sprightly maid could bring on spring all by herself and Raddall invests Dickon with a gold tinged tenor and an ingratiating personality. Thanisch-Smith is an exquisite and ethereal presence throughout the play, and trills in a lovely lyric coloratura. Stacey as the spunky Mary holds the evening together with a fine voice, impeccable diction and broad comic savvy.
The heroic seven-piece band, sounding much bigger, is under the baton of Robert Ursan, an operatic conductor who demonstrated his musical comedy abilities in Into the Woods.
The Secret Garden is really about grief, loss and the relentless grip of memory – but the uplifting message is one of the restorative powers of hope, possibly summed up best by Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper in the 1955 film, Night of the Hunter: “Lord, save little children. The wind blows and the rain’s a-cold. Yet they abide, and they endure.”
