Stage West's 'The Secret Garden' impresses

By BARBARA L. FREDRICKSEN

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 13, 2001

The 25-member cast of the Stage West Community Playhouse production of The Secret Garden created pure stage magic at Thursday's opening, showcasing the group's strength -- its choral ensemble and individual singers -- and giving the spellbound audience 21/2 hours of genuine theater pleasure.

Even so, it was the crew -- musical director Roberta Moger, light and set designer Todd Everest, director Barbara Everest, costumer Madeline Child, set building chief Sig Stock and sound technician Linda Dilts -- who supplied the framework that let the magic happen.

The difficult show, with its unfamiliar, operatic, near-continual singing, proved that Stage West was right when it decided to go with a recorded soundtrack instead of a live orchestra for this production. There's no way that amateur and/or quasi-professional musicians could have learned the intricate, unconventional score, much less kept the music going almost non-stop for 21/2 hours.

The theater was also right to capitalize on the set designing skills of Todd Everest, whose triple set and slip-sliding set pieces made scene changes virtually unnoticeable.

In The Secret Garden, based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, young Mary Lennox nee Arwood) is sent to the forbidding English estate of her uncle, Archibald Craven (Dalton Benson) after the deaths of her parents at a remote outpost in India, where her father was stationed in Queen Victoria's army.

She arrives to find a distracted, hunchbacked uncle still grieving over the loss of his beloved wife, Lily (Pam Surbaugh), and ignoring his bedridden son Colin (Teddy Toye), who believes he is going to die at any moment. She also meets Archibald's brother, Dr. Neville Craven (Stan Kane), who has given up his medical practice to take care of young Colin, but is smothering him instead.

On a stroll around the grounds one day, Mary encounters the Scottish gardener Ben Weatherstaff (Phil Hilton) and his son Dicken (Alan Pagan), who leads her to a key to a secret garden that was once a haven for Lily, the dead wife/mother. Dicken tells Mary that the garden will grow back, if it is nurtured and cared for, an obvious metaphor for the withered soul of her uncle Archie and the crippled body of her cousin Colin.

Stage West bills the show as family friendly, but children younger than, say, 10 or 12 may be confused by the ethereal appearances of loving and helpful spirits and ghosts throughout the play, unless the youngsters are very familiar with the story (and during the play isn't the time to tell them about it).

Mary's parents (Tom Russell and Shirley Button), their friends and their servants are dead, but they are still very much alive in Mary's life, in her mind and on the stage.

Ms. Moger had her work cut out for her in this production. The melodies are often as tangled and twisted as the vines that have overtaken the secret garden, and it takes all the skills of the singers and their leader to keep the music under control.

The Stage West actors are, for the most part, up to the task, particularly Ms. Surbaugh, Kane, and, in their Stage West debuts, young Pagan and 15-year-old Leslie Taylor as Mary's maid Martha.

All of the singers worked well with the recorded music, losing their places only a couple of times during the evening but catching up quickly.

Director Everest wisely encouraged her troupe to use accents to give a feel of time and place, and this worked well, especially Hilton's and Pagan's roooooling Scottish brogues and the soft English intonations of the thoroughly enchanting Miss Arwood.

Special kudos to Barbara Hilton, who stepped into the role of Mrs. Winthrop after the original actor was injured in an auto accident on the way to the theater Thursday evening. Ms. Hilton hid the script behind her handbag, but was able to deliver the lines with feeling and emotion, and her fellow players never missed a beat.

The Secret Garden is as well-wrought as two earlier Stage West masterpieces, Man of La Mancha and Into the Woods, and should be considered this season's do-not-miss production.

If you go

WHAT: The Secret Garden

WHERE: Stage West Community Playhouse, 8390 Forest Oaks Blvd., Spring Hill

WHEN: Thursdays and weekends through Jan. 28. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays.

TICKETS: $14 adults, $7 students. Box office is open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and one hour before each show. Call (352) 683-5113.

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