Review: THE SECRET GARDEN at Ahmanson Theatre

With a rising awareness of gender parity issues on theatre creative teams and the recent losses of composer Lucy Simon and actress Rebecca Luker, it seems inevitable that The Secret Garden should be revived and welcomed back into the limelight. After all, when the show opened on Broadway in 1991, it made history as the first major musical with an almost exclusively-female creative team. In the current production presented by Center Theatre Group, whether caused by the lack of women on the creative team or not, the show is certainly missing a lot of its heart and is in need of a lot of polishing.

Director and choreographer Warren Carlyle is a surprising-- and in my opinion, misguided-- choice to helm the project. Simon's score paired with Frances Hodgson Burnett's source material have an earthy folksiness that makes one want to take off their shoes, wriggle their toes in the mud, and splash about making a mess. There is a quaint, childlike magic to the piece that Carlyle tries to coerce into a broad musical comedy more in line with his recent Broadway credits like The Music Man or Hello, Dolly!. The result is a staging that seems to be constantly at odds with, and worse, apologizing for the source material. Other than a lively choreographed rendition of "Come Spirit, Come Charm" in Act II (which worthily rouses the audience), the characters float about the stage randomly with little to visually captivate the audience. Moments that are not written for laughs are consistently played for laughs. Right from the start, the possibilities of an ethereal ghost story are fumbled in favor of a lot of stuffy people in white milling around the stage.

If we look at Carlyle's body of work, it is dominated by big-ticket revivals of shows we want to see staged in ways that evoke their former glory. Daniel Fish can do what he wants to Oklahoma!, Diane Paulus can have her way with Pippin, and Sammi Cannold can have a blast with Evita, but producers rely on Carlyle to pick up where Gower Champion left off. We need artists able to deliver big, flashy, Broadway musicals because no one wants to see Ivo van Hove's Guys and Dolls. However, there is a delicateness to The Secret Garden that Carlyle completely bulldozes, and it makes me wish a director with a different background were tasked with reviving this show.

Jason Sherwood's scenic design gives Carlyle little to work with; a spiral of bound wire mesh oafishly loiters, taking up most of the stage, and rather than creating a hazy space in which the past and present can play out before us in unison, we are looking at black duvetyn, plywood, and glow tape for the duration of the evening. The libretto describes a world that is difficult to recreate on stage, but even Sherwood's interpretation of the revived garden at the end of the show seems like something out of a polished, regional production of She Loves Me, not a well-loved fairytale. It falls upon the gown Ann Hould-Ward has draped upon the ghostly figure of Lily to suggest a Victorian ghost story instead of the clearance section of Home Depot which Sherwood seems to evoke.

Above and beyond all other shortcomings by the creative team, they failed to examine Burnett's portrayal of India as a sandy wasteland where everyone is taught magical spells. The India presented in Burnett's original book may be one that could be excused by an American audience in the 1990s, but in 2023 it seems that there are dozens of directors equipped with the ability to portray a non-western culture in a way that is not exotic, mystical, or the stuff of orientalist fantasy. Unfortunately, it takes more than a bit of color-blind casting to bring this musical into the twenty-first century and it was disappointing to see how little work was undertaken in that regard for this production. I was gobsmacked not to see a dramaturg credited in the program, but then a woman in a red henna unitard walked out on stage and I suppose I knew what I was in for.

Emily Jewel Hoder is excellent as Mary Lennox. The character is daunting-- she is cold and harsh in her interactions from the first time we meet her-- yet Hoder manages to win our sympathies and delivers a sound rendition of "The Girl I Mean to Be" which tugs at heartstrings while still being direct and true-to-form. John-Michael Lyles' Dickon is spritely and fresh and he infuses "Winter's on the Wing" and "Wick" with a pop sensibility that seems to wake up the score. But, the unequivocal star of the evening is Julia Lester as Martha who brings the house down with the stirring anthem, "Hold On" in the second act. Had her tv co-stars not filled the orchestra section on opening night, I believe she still would have heard the loudest applause of the evening when she had finished her eleven o'clock number. Overall, the vocals in the show are solid, perhaps hindered by a uniform phlegm-iness which we'll either credit to the recent influx of precipitation in LA or the hazy fog of the English moors.

If you already have tickets to The Secret Garden, there's no need to despair. The musical itself is a gem and you are sure to enjoy your evening. Just don't get your hopes up for an inventive reimagining or updated interpretation beyond what you might see from a bus and truck tour of the original.

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