Michael Coveney Daily Mail 28/02/2001
Although Michael's review of the show wasn't full of praise. He did say "And Philip Quast as the nasty Uncle and Dilys Laye as fussing house keeper are superb"
Victorian drama is child's play for RSC
- The Secret Garden | Aldwych Theatre, London
- By Jonathan Myerson 28 February 2001
What is it with Victorians and people locked in Yorkshire attic rooms waiting to be discovered by intrepid females during electric storms?
Like a child's own Jane Eyre, Mary Lennox enters the household at Misselthwaite Manor like a breath of sulky, tempestuous air, determined to do it her way. But she is tamed first by a stable boy's lesson in bird language and then by her own discovery of the abandoned garden. That done, she has only one remaining quest: the child who screams in the night. And as befits an under-12s version, this hidden sufferer will be cured rather than consigned.
Played with energetic charm by Natalie Morgan, Mary is the frequently invisible core of this show, singing like a trouper and pouting like a demon. For while she is the story's catalyst, it is the grown-ups who carry the emotional burden. In this Broadway version, now brought to London via Stratford, the adult cast is fleshed out by a phalanx of ghosts - the dead parents.
As Uncle Archie, Philip Quast sings most of his duets with Meredith Braun as his long-dead wife and cause of his self-imposed isolation. Against a backdrop of Renoirish umbrellas, she convinces him to forget her. As a result, he can return to discover how Mary and her gang have cured Colin and trounced evil Uncle Neville.
So is this a show for children or grown-ups? The music and singing is all rather gloopy and intense - often about adult love and despair. And the dialogue lacks the sustained humour and surprise that children need. My eight-year-old insisted there were "too many songs that were the same". But if the show's intended for grown-ups, do we really want to watch Mary's rather simplistic crusade and Dickon's Listen To Nature lectures?
That said, Adrian Noble's staging is magnificent, using sliding screens and waltzing doorways to say everything you need to know about the darkness of the house and the hopes buried in the garden. And the company is marshalled magnificently, sweeping across the stage in glissando waves of gardeners or housemaids. Only the RSC can turn scene changes into swirling tableaux like this.
This is family entertainment - something for everyone though rarely everything for someone.
Irresistible - but it could have been better
- Charles Spencer reviews The Secret Garden at Aldwych Theatre
- Telegraph 01/03/2001
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT's The Secret Garden (1911) is one of the most beautiful and beloved of all children's books, and at first I bitterly resented the fact that it had been turned into a musical. Does this lovely story in which loneliness, illness and loss gradually blossom into friendship, happiness and health really need a chorus of dancing maids or a battallion of gardeners twirling hoes and brooms like drum majorettes? No, it doesn't.
Does it also need psychobabble about the child heroine needing the secret garden as personal space in which to grow, or the distracting presence of the ghosts of those who have died before the narrative begins? Again, the answer is an emphatic negative.
The musical opened in New York 10 years ago, and has many of the faults of the not-quite-top-drawer Broadway tune-and-toe show. An intimate story about childhood and the pleasures of gardening has been pumped up into an overblown gothic romance. The music by Lucy Simon (sister of Carly) nods to the English folk tradition, but is dominated by anthemic uplift and yearning love songs, and Marsha Norman's lyrics are often trite. One wishes that Vaughan Williams had written a suite inspired by The Secret Garden - he would have got to the pastoral heart of this mysterious story, set in a great house and garden on the edge of the Yorkshire moors.
Still, it is fruitless to repine over a show that doesn't exist, and The Secret Garden, already a big hit for the RSC at Stratford, is clearly capable of giving a lot of people a lot of pleasure. The best thing about it is Adrian Noble's fluid, cinematic staging. The opening sequence, which moves the action from a nightmarish cholera outbreak in India to the dark house in Yorkshire, is virtuosic, and the climactic blooming of the garden is another triumph of stagecraft, helped by Anthony Ward's fine impressionistic designs.
As he proved with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Noble isn't daunted by either children or animals, and there are delightful performances here from the child actors, while the robin who leads the children to the long-neglected garden is deployed with real stage magic. The casting of the children rotates, but, on opening night, Natalie Morgan was superb as Mary, "as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived", in the no-nonsense words of the novel. Morgan captures the temper tantrums and the class-bred insolence of the girl, and her sentimental education is powerfully affecting
Luke Newberry is equally good as the sickly Colin, morbidly convinced that he's going to grow a hunchback and die an early death. The moment when he climbs out of his wheelchair and takes a few hesitant steps is unforgettable, and his cracked treble singing voice will break many hearts.
Among the adults, Philip Quast is a strong-voiced, darkly brooding presence as Colin's father, in deep unhealthy mourning for his beloved wife, though Peter Polycarpou could make much more of his sinister brother, the real villain of the piece.
There are good performances, however, from Linzi Hateley as a warm-hearted maid, Craig Purnell as Dickon, a ginger-haired, broad-Yorkshire Pan figure, and from the great Freddie "Parrot Face" Davies as the gruff head gardener with the inevitable heart of gold.
By the end, intellectual resistance to The Secret Garden has become futile, as the tear-ducts start pumping out the briny. You'll be needing your tissues.
Laying it on with a trowel - by Benedict Nightingale the Times 01/03/2001
The musical of The Secret Garden causes our correspondent to brush aside a guilty tear.
Thank goodness for the children. Because the law requires them to be rotated, you may see Eliza Caird or Tamsin Egerton Dick as orphaned Mary Lennox and Eddie Brown or Adam Clarke as her bedridden cousin, Colin Craven in The Secret Garden at the Aldwych Theatre; and they’re doubtless fine. But Luke Newberry and, especially, Natalie Morgan have the personality to save Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon’s musical adaptation of a beloved novel from seeming more sentimentally didactic than it does.
Mary’s twin tasks are to redeem Colin from valetudinarian solitude and to be redeemed by nature, and especially by the secret garden she discovers and tills, from emotional isolation. Morgan makes these feats greater, and the dramatic stakes higher, by being more aggressive and superficially unappealing than even Frances Hodgson Burnett wanted. She frowns, pouts, scowls, snaps, yells and exorcises by violent tantrum the headmistress who plots to abduct her to Scotland. Told by the garden boy, Dickon (Craig Purnell), that a robin might fly to her if she were friendlier, she ferociously screeches: “Can’t you tell him I’m friendly?” — and the first-night audience roared.
I couldn’t quite share that audience’s rapturous enthusiasm, but I must confess to having enjoyed myself more than when I caught Adrian Noble’s production in Stratford three months ago. I even guiltily brushed away a warning of a hint of a tear when Mary, Colin and his father were reconciled to a background of tumbling roses, dutiful Yorkshire servants and serenely smiling ghosts.
That owed much to the kids, but also plenty to Philip Quast, who brings authority to an impossible role. I can’t think of many actors who wouldn’t seem preposterous if they had so often to mooch through mist looking like a blend of Mr Rochester and the Phantom of the Opera, with a bit of Quasimodo thrown in; but Quast manages the feat.
Quast’s Sir Archibald is, of course, the widowed and desperately grieving owner of desolate Misselthwaite Manor; and here’s the first big problem. Unless they’re written by Sondheim, musicals don’t like desolation. Absurdly, Archie has a whole chorus to tend his place, and, sadly, it’s a chorus with not a lot to do except dance gleefully about being maids, manservants, undergardeners in caps or milkmaids in flowery frocks. They push the evening towards tweeness, while Archie’s doctor brother, Peter Polycarpou’s Neville, edges it into melodrama.
I still can’t work out why he’s so grimly determined to keep Colin an invalid. Is he stupid, bigoted, villainously determined to inherit Misselthwaite or madly sublimating his love for his brother’s dead wife? Actually, I suspect the reason he’s so different from Burnett’s original is that Norman is adding spurious tension to a story that, with Dickon prancing like Pan and everyone singing odes to spring and rebirth, threatens to become propaganda for Friends of the Earth.
Never mind. Norman’s lyrics may occasionally plod, but Simon’s music stays upbeat and agreeably tuneful. If the Green Party needs a theme-song for the coming general election, they might find it somewhere here.
- The Secret Garden **** star rating
- by Siobhan Murphy The Metro 01/03/2001
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s tale transfixed many of us as youngsters — the orphaned girl left to her own devices in an enormous house on the Yorkshire moors who discovers the secrets buried under the household’s stifling exterior and tries to make changes for the better.
Marsha Norman’s award-winning musical adaptation captures all the magic of the book and the RSC has taken this up and run with it in its incredibly slick production. The Aidwych’s stage does not offer the kind of space most West End musicals revel in but the design team, led by Anthony Ward, have come up with some ingenious staging devices. Clever lighting and the actors themselves often give a strong sense of place with minimal props.
The cast is strong, with excellent performances from Linzi Hateley as Martha the maid and Craig Purnell as Dickon, her brother. But the night was stolen by the fiery talent of Natalie Morgan, one of three girls who will play the lead role of Mary Lennox, who stomped and shouted like a banshee but sang like an angel.
By the very nature of the story (everyone lives happily ever after) there could be no heart-stopping, Les Mis-style finale and, after some of the stunning set pieces, to leave the theatre with just a warm glow was a little disappointing. But the exuberance of the cast more than made up for that.
- Return Of the Garden Party *** Star rating
- Review by Robert Gore-Langton Daily Express 02/03/ 2001
You won’t find a more smut-free or wholesome show than the RSC’s new musical, THE SECRET GARDEN. I loved this show in Stratford last year (it has now transferred to London ) and I still like it. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s imperishable classic still works its magic and I defy you not to sob during the final scenes when crippled Colin gets well.
It works largely because the children are so good, particularly Natalie Morgan as Mary Lennox, the orphan girl who ends up in the big house on the wuthering moors where her bed-ridden cousin Colin (Luke Newberry) is expected to die. Philip Quast is splendid as the hunchback uncle literally haunted by his dead wife and for rustic appeal there’s Freddie Davies, a constant joy as the jowly Yorkshire gardener with a pet robin instead of a parrot.
But the things in the show that needed fixing haven’t been fixed. The designs give little hint of the horticultural magic going on in the garden itself and the songs in Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon’s musical are too samey and too many.
However, the show works along much the same lines as the RSC’s previous knees up The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe - with goodies and baddies evenly matched and sorrow and joy dished out in equal measures. Adrian Noble’s production was rapturously received, even by first night standards, and it looks as if it will be around for quite a while.
- Secret Garden Aldwych Theatre
- Review by Sheridan Morley
The Royal Shakespeare Company's new Secret Garden opened triumphantly at Stratford in the autumn and comes to London sharper and more streamlined.
The RSC trackrecord in musicals has not been as good of late ( remember Carrie?) but this brings them back to their Les Miserables form.
The score is similar-dark, largely through-sung, with complex plots and six central characters.
Since opening on Broadway a decade ago playwrite Marsha Norman and composer Lucy Simon(Carly's sister) have drastically rewritten the play.
From the Indian prologue through to the final Yorkshire happy ending, Gillian Lynnes choreography brilliantly sets the tone of Adrian Nobles production.
The Secret Garden is about cholera, wicked uncles and sinister guardians and a young girl coming to maturity.
The immensely strong cast includes Philip Quast and peter Polycarpou as the uncles, Linzi Hateley and Dilys Laye, comic Freddie Davies and a trio of young gifted teenages.
The Secret Garden has a depth, clarity and energy that's not been seen in the West End for years.
It has a dark and secret heart and moments of utter joy. Far and away the Best Musical of this new century.
Cover Picture by Gareth McCarthy & Production Photography by Manuel Harlan
- 'The Secret Garden' Aldwych.Theatre.
- Review by Jane Edwards Time Out 07/03/2001
Given that the countryside is currently portrayed by pictures of burning animals and buckets of disinfectant, it's just as well to be reminded that it once was valued for its healing, restorative properties. Marsha Norman and Lucy (sister of Carly) Simon's musical is a very free version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's enthralling children's classic in which the sour orphan Mary Lennox arrives in Yorkshire and is taught by country-bred Dickon to discover new life in I the bleakest of landscapes. As she mellows under his spell, so she also does wonders for her cousin, the supposedly crippled Colin.
The book is distinguished by Mary's initial loneliness and her spiky inability to relate to other people. But the musical attempts to appeal to adults as well as children by building up the story of Archibald Craven, Colin's father: he can't let go of his dead wife, Lily, who drifts across the stage as a ghost. For all the stirring qualities of Philip Quast's singing as Archibald, this new theme is not a patch on the developing relationship between the children and their search for the secret garden which is misguidedly pushed to the sidelines.
Misselthwaite Manor, a dark, gothic mansion in the book, is here packed with perky servants who create the most exciting musical climax with their energetic, stamping celebration of the garden choreographed by Gillian Lynne. Elsewhere, it's difficult to see what the songs add, except squidgy sentiment, especially given the strength of performances that director Adrian Noble coaxes out of the children. They could easily hold our attention without any music at all. Craig Purnell makes a perfect carrot-topped Dickon, even if he is rather old for the role. Natalie Morgan is wonderfully bad-tempered as Mary, and Luke Newberry very affecting as Colin rising out of his wheelchair. The show has bags of old-fashioned charm, and my small companion was mostly enchanted especially by Ben Weatherstaff's robin who kept us baffled by its magical appearances onstage as if from nowhere.
- Back to Nature
- Roger Foss discovers 'The Secret Garden'
- review in What's on in London 07/03/2001
Has spring arrived already? At long last a family-friendly musical has taken root and is blossoming in the West End, The RSC's production of The Secret Garden arrives at the Aldwych after a sell-out Christmas season at Stratford-upon-Avon where school parties and family groups packed an auditorium normally reserved for Shakespeare buffs. I saw for myself how rows of tiny tots and teenagers, no doubt used to a cultural diet of Pokémon and text messaging, tuned in to this stern Edwardian tale of little orphaned Mary Lennox discovering the key to happiness in a spooky locked-up garden.
The transplant to London hasn't been entirely sccessful. After the hothouse atmosphere at Stratford, the silhouetted scenery does look a bit stunted onthe Aldwych's cold proscenium stage, as if a plague of aphids has stunted the sliding forest of translucent trees. Besides, as a coach party outing the show probably lacks the Disneyfled kudos of The Lion King, which is still drawing the crowds just along the Strand. But I suspect the secret of Adrian Noble's production is that it doesn't dodge the darkness of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic children's novel. Using nerve-racking thunderclaps and tons of swirling dry ice to underscore the melodramatic doom and gloom, this child's-eye-view of adults haunted by phantoms ought to appeal to both the Harry Potter generation and grown-ups revisiting their own childhood night terrors.
The show is ripe with symbolic seasonal stuff about wintry decay, spring renewal and summer growth mostly signalled by a troupe of under-gardeners hooting charmingly to Gillian Lynne's delightful horticultural choreography. And ten years after it first opened on Broadway, Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon's musicalisation takes root from the very first scene, when young Mary is swiftly whisked away from cholera-strickenIndia and plonked down in funereal Misslethwaite Manor, her Uncle Archibald's bleak house on the windswept Yorkshire moors.
Within these walls hunch-backed Uncle Archie has spent ten years going pear-shaped and pacing the corridors mourning the loss of Lily his young wife who died in childbirth. Ten-year-old Mary is a snooty little madam used to bossing the servants and getting her own way, but left to her own devices she befriends Martha, a cheery parlour maid and Dickon, an earthy carrot-haired gardener, and finally brings a spark of life to sickly little Colin, Archie's equally petulant bed-ridden son who has been locked away in an attic for most of his life.
Ghosts waft through the rooms and you can almost smell the moorland peat outside, although the pity is that song-wise there isn't enough to hum on your way home. Two numbers stand out in the second act: 'Lily's Eyes' and 'How Could I Ever Know'. And a couple of child stars (Natalie Morgan and Luke Newberry on the press night) as the kids discovering the locked garden's healing powers, together with Philip Quast as the haunted Uncle Archie who learns to let go of his wife's spirit, sing as if their vocal chords are attached to their heart strings. But the music, like this classic story, definitely grows on you.
- The Secret Garden
- Review by Matt Wolf Variety 05/03/2001
For all the insistence on charms in the plot of "The Secret Garden," Adrian Noble's Royal Shakespeare Co. London preem of a decade-old show could use some plain, flat-out charm if it is to cast a theatrical spell beyond children's holiday time. There's no denying the care and attention that have gone into rethinking a Broadway long-runner from 1991 only now receiving its London debut, if only so that a musical based on a beloved English children's classic will feel at home in its country of origin. But for all the cosmetic changes from the New York original -- a far less busy set, a swifter opening sequence, some reordering and reworking of both the book and Lucy Simon's buoyant score the show still feels suspended between a banal self-help handbook and a troubling inquiry into real grief that the creators don't seem to know what to do with. A few performers get the balance right and even catch at the throat, the thrilling Philip Quast most especially. Nevertheless, what remains is a work that is certainly open to RSC-style classical acumen, but hasn't yet fully received it.
Dry ice is forgivable (still, must there really be quite this much?), but when it comes to "The Secret Garden," dry eyes are not. All the more reason, then, to sit up at the first appearance of Quast's Archibald Craven, a man beset by mourning for the lovely Lily (Meredith Braun) who died 10 years before. Father to Colin (Luke Newberry), the sickly child whom his late wife left behind, Archie no more wants to come to terms with his family - a seethingly jealous brother, Neville (Peter Polycarpou), included -- than he does with his own barely suppressed feelings of guilt and blame.
What Archie needs is the release and rebirth similarly sought by his orphaned niece, Mary Lennox (Natalie Morgan), who finds succor in the hidden garden of the title. In "The Secret Garden," you don't just wait for Anthony Ward's sliding, Perspex-paneled set to bloom, which it does far less fancifully than Heidi Ettinger's somewhat over designed Broadway original. The characters exist to follow nature's lead, too.
Marsha Norman's book can't resist pounding home Frances Hodgson Burnett's delicately expressed themes. "It's been locked up," Mary says to Colin of the garden, "just like you've been locked up" in Misselthwaite, the forbidding Yorkshire manor that he none too happily calls home. "There's a lot of things that looks dead," says local lad Dickon (a delightfully feisty Craig Purnell, his carrot-colored hair a welcome indication during the course of the show that some much-needed fun may well be at hand). "(But) they're just biding their time."
If Norman's psychology is strictly pro forma, at least Quast is on hand to embody the darker, self-contradictory impulses that the writing shies away from. Having played Neville in this show's Australian premiere, Quast moves up to the larger role of Archie like one to the manner -- and manor -- born, his imposing physique turned almost inward to accommodate this most haunted of hunchbacks. Archie is first seen from behind, lost incontemplation of a painting of Lily, a canvas that (a neat touch) looks faded, as if it, too, were lost to the viewer.
Very much evident is Archie's tussle within -- prompted by Mary's resemblance to her uncle's dead wife -- which comes pouring forth to revelatory effect at the start of act two. Quast partners a moustachioed Polycarpou on a knockout duet of "Lily's Eyes," the song positioned later than it was on Broadway, and then draws audible sniffles in the scene by the ailing Colin's bedside, when Archie realizes that the dragon whom he is describing might well be himself.
A double Olivier Award winner (for "Sunday in the Park With George" and "The Fix"), Quast here makes a bid for a third, his voice soaring almost Sweeney Todd-like in anguish one minute, floating a lovely falsetto the next. As a depiction of the relentless grip of memory, the performance shakes the entire evening by the scruff of its neck.
That's no bad thing, either, given a host of unexpectedly stock performances (Linzi Hateley's Martha, the maid, among them), Chris Parry's notably unatmospheric lighting, and some cutesy choreography from Gillian Lynne that makes a halfhearted stab at a Susan Stroman-esque deployment of props (garden implements, mostly). Three children each share the crucial roles of Mary and Colin, but neither of the opening-night pair suggests a career-in-the-making. Newberry's large, wounded eyes are perfect for the bedridden young boy, but his singing lets him down, not least during "Round Shouldered Man," Colin's fantasy of release.
Morgan can sing up a storm, all right, and throw tantrums and pull any of a dozen or so inexpressive faces. But she's so busy bullying herself about the stage that her Mary Lennox seems ripe less for regeneration amid the final flotilla of roses than to play the sullen daughter in a stage version of "The Exorcist." Now who's been keeping that idea secret?
- The Secret Garden
- Review by Lisa Martland The Stage 08/03/2001
It has taken ten years for this musical version of Frances Hodgson Burnett¹s classic children¹s tale to reach the West End from Broadway, but Adrian Noble¹s Royal Shakespeare Company production has, in the main, been well worth the wait.
Those connoisseurs who love the novel may have problems with the way librettist/lyricist Marsha Norman has emphasised the dramatic mood of certain situations, and, for them, the musical genre itself could potentially threaten the piece¹s tone. In some respects, the latter would be a fair criticism, for Gillian Lynne¹s ensemble choreography in particular is rather out of context compared with director Noble¹s subtle staging elsewhere.
Yet the creative team and an excellent cast ensure that on many levels this is a joyous experience, and one that boasts a compelling sometimes quite humorous story and strong score. Designer Anthony Ward¹s sets depict the wonder of the garden, at Þrst represented by branches embossed on translucent moving panels, together with the dark, solid doorways inside young Mary Lennox¹s new home.
Norman and composer Lucy Simon¹s numbers sometimes veer towards the melodramatic, but there are musical gems aplenty. Linzi Hateley, as maid Martha, inspires young Mary during Hold On, and Craig Purnell (Martha¹s brother Dickon) sings of the seasons with Winter¹s On the Wing. Elsewhere, Philip Quast¹s portrayal of Mary¹s uncle is both powerful and poignant, as is his Act II duet with the ghost of his beloved wife (an impressive Meredith Braun).
For this performance Natalie Morgan took on the role of Mary, while Luke Newberry was Colin, her invalid cousin. Both are outstanding, with Morgan justiÞ- ably receiving an ovation for her Þne singing and all-round performance.
- The Secret Garden *** star rating
- Review by Martin Spence Midweek magazine 12/03/2001
A glammed-up Yorkshire, alive with boots and bonnets, is the real star of this atmospheric take on Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. Kively lasses and jolly lads sing out their odes to nature and global warming in nineteenth century Yorkshire. Or prance about with brollies to indicate the dastardly meterology of France.
Banged up in a mysterious manor, Natalie Morgan's knockout orphan Mary is ruder than Anne Robinson to her bedridden cousin (luke Newberry: terrific) whose psychosmatic illness she later cures. Resuscitation is the very Victorian theme, as both the boy and the dead garden are restored to life by human kindness.
Philip Quast brings massive authority to the uncle, a cross between Quasimodo and Mr Rocester.The chorus is cleverly used to brisk up Burnett's rather sentimental didacticism.
They buzz busily hither and thither dressed as servants, gardeners and suchlike. They put over Marsha Norman's lachrymos lyrics with pizazz, they know their place, and even produce a nifty dance at the conclusion. Their feelgood energy is counterpointed by weird spooks in ballroom clobber, who appear like lost souls, singing songs of comfort to their loved ones. A nice touch: the obsessive doctor here may be a villain.
Marsha Norman's book finds imaginative new forms to Burnett's metaphors and somewhat overpopulated storyline. Adrian Noble's slick direction fuses the disparate elements into an engagingly evocative whole. Lucy Simon's music is as pretty as the large pink roses that flutter down into the Secret Garden where the kids' final release from loneliness is a well deserved joy.
- The Secret Garden: An impressive musical revival of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic children's book
- Review by Louise Kingsley TNT magazine 12/03/2001
FRANCES Hodgson Burnett's 1911 children's book has been made into a film, TV production and now the Royal Shakespeare Company has revamped the 10 year old award winning Broadway version with music by Carly Simon's sister Lucy.
Mary Lennox is left an orphan when her parents are wiped out by a cholera epidemic in India. She is taken in by her widowed uncle Archibald, a sad and reclusive hunchback who cannot forget his wife, Lily, who died childbirth years earlier.
But although he gives Mary a place to live in his isolated manor on the Yorkshire moors, Archibald's thoughts are elsewhere. Left to her own devices, grumpy, spoilt Mary makes friends for the first time and discovers the joys of the plant and animal world in the company of head gardenerBen (Freddie Davies), Martha ( Linzi Hateley) and her rustic brother Dickon (Craig Purnell).
And thanks to a friendly robin that helps her unearth the key to Lily's mysterious memorial garden, she restores her bedridden cousin Colin to surprisingly good health.
Adrian Nobel's production opened last year in Stratford where it proved an appealing alternative to the conventional Christmas enetertainment. Its flaws ( clumpy choreography, a trio of insiped ghosts) are more exposed on the West End stage, and you're never in danger of reaching for the tissues.
But Natalie Morgan is suitably grouchy and boasts a strong voice. Eddie Brown (Colin) also impresses and the charismatic Philip Quast manages to make the unhappy Archibald surprisingly sympathetic for a man fond of wallowing in his own misfortune.
- Secret Garden (RSC) Rating: 3 star
- Review by Mark Shenton What's on Stage 02/03/2001
At a time when the RSC is riding high with its epic sweep of Shakespeare's entire cycle of history plays, it's curious that the company's esteemed artistic director Adrian Noble has chosen not to direct any of them but to lend his talents to producing The Secret Garden, a ten-year-old Broadway musical version of a classic children's story by Frances Hodgson Burnett instead.
He does a good job of it, too - but is this really the way to lead the company from the front, a company whose whole raison d'etre, embodied in its very name, is the work of Britain's pre-eminent dramatist?
In contrast, The Secret Garden is slight and simultaneously rather severe stuff indeed, though it is efficiently, even movingly, rendered in the book of Marsha Norman and a score by Lucy Simon that is, at times, drenched in yearning melody. Is there a lovelier song to be heard on a London stage right now than "How Could I Ever Know"? I doubt it.
The show that contains it has a slow-burning, gathering appeal. Initially austere in its forbidding atmosphere, it opens under a cloud of death. A precocious young girl, Mary Lennox, is found orphaned in India after her parents' death from cholera and is repatriated to Yorkshire to live with her widowed uncle, Archibald Craven. He is himself still hauntingly bereaved by the loss of his wife, Lily (sister to Mary's mother), who died giving birth to an ailing son, Colin. Thus, the stage is set for an evening of grim Victorian realism and, for the first act at least, a relentless gloom pervades.
But the second act charts a dramatic progress towards something that is eventually quite uplifting, even radiant. It is in this act that the show's most resonant melodies take hold - including "Lily's Eyes", an extraordinary anthem to Archibald's lost wife, which is performed by Archibald (the superb Philip Quast) and his brother, Neville (Peter Polycarpou), who also harboured an unspoken passion for her.
Noble's production is greatly enhanced by the simple, beautiful designs of moving screens by Anthony Ward, and somewhat undermined by the annoyingly folksy peasant dances that Gillian Lynne has supplied. But the strong vocal performances from a cast that also includes Meredith Braun as the late Lily, and Linzi Hateley as a maid - not to mention a couple of stunning child actors in the roles of Mary and Colin - maintain the interest throughout, even when the book and especially the choreography occasionally falters.
- The Secret Garden at the Aldwych Theatre
- Review by Darren Dalglish London Theatre Guide 01/03/2001
The Royal Shakespeare Company do not produce many musicals so it was with great interest that I looked forward to seeing their new musical staging of “The Secret Garden”. This show broke all box office records in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it opened with an advance of over 1 million ukp last year. Directed by Adrian Noble, it is based on the novel by Frances Hodgon Burnett and has book lyrics by Marsha Norman and music by Lucy Simon.
I was once told that if you have high expectation for something, then you are certain to be disappointed. In this case that person is correct as I found “The Secret Garden” to be basically average, and this is mainly because the music is ordinary and bland. The score badly lets the production down because the acting, singing and dancing is solid and the set design by Anthony Ward is a delight.
The story concerns a young girl called Mary Lennox who has lived all her life in India. However, when both her parents die of cholera, she is sent home to England to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, in the lonely Yorkshire Moors. However, her uncle is still mourning the loss of his wife who died 10 years ago and has become detached from Colin, his crippled son, who was born the same day his wife died. But when the spoilt and bad-tempered Mary arrives, the quite routine of the household is to change, particularly when Mary befriends the servants and discovers a secret garden which is to play a significant part in their lives.
This is a beautiful and magical story that has a very touching conclusion. However, as I said the music is unmemorable resulting in the show lacking any punch. But it is saved by a great story and a great performance from Philip Quast as Mary’s uncle. His singing and acting is of the highest quality as he brilliantly portrays a man who is self-destructive because of his deep grief and refusal to come to terms with his loss. Quast’s performance is essential to this show. He alone holds the production together. The children, Mary and Colin, were played by Tamsin Egerton Dick and Eddie Brown in this performance, and both played their parts well and have good singing voices. The rest of the company produce solid, competent performances that we have come to expect from the RSC.
The show has received a mixed response from the popular press.... NICOLAS DE JONGE for THE EVENING STANDARD says, "A weeping melodrama that bursts out in a riot of forgettable tunes, unexceptional songs and dreary dance routines." JONATHAN MYERSON for THE INDEPENDENT says, "Adrian Noble's staging is magnificent, using sliding screens and waltzing doorways to say everything you need to know about the darkness of the house and the hopes buried in the garden." He goes on to say, "This is family entertainment - something for everyone though rarely everything for someone." BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE for THE TIMES says, "Norman's lyrics may occasionally plod, but Simon's music stays upbeat and agreeably tuneful." CHARLES SPENCER for THE DAILY TELEGRAPH says, "Irresistible - but it could have been better." He goes on to say, "By the end, intellectual resistance to The Secret Garden has become futile, as the tear-ducts start pumping out the briny. You'll be needing your tissues."
“The Secret Garden” is a charming show that many will enjoy because of its enchanting story, but you won’t come away from the theatre feeling you have witnessed anything outstanding, with the exception of Philip Quast of course!
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