By Hap Erstein
More interested in spiritual rebirth than the usual romance that fuels musicals, with a score more attuned to British folk melodies than Tin Pan Alley hits, you can understand why 1991’s underrated The Secret Garden is rarely revived these days.
And then there is the casting challenge of its main character, 12-year-old Mary Lennox, the suddenly orphaned tot saddled with justifiable melancholy and a number of difficult, rangy songs.
The former did not faze Caldwell Theatre artistic director Clive Cholerton, who had already prepared its audiences for the unconventional by leading off the Boca Raton company’s Broadway Concert Series with several shows by Stephen Sondheim. As to the latter, he simply lucked out, when Melissa Minyard, the series’ perennial leading lady, suggested that her daughter Catherine could handle the role.
Boy, can she, as the audience at Friday’s opening performance of an all-too-brief weekend run quickly realized. The remarkably poised youngster, refreshingly absent of professional training mannerisms yet possessing an assured vocal delivery style, helped this become one of the most accomplished concerts in the series’ brief history.
The show, based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s enduring, metaphor and life lesson-laden children’s novel from 1911, was created by an all-female creative team largely outside the Broadway mainstream. Composer Lucy Simon cobbled her first theater score from folk and pop idioms, with touches of the exotic sounds of India, married to simple, unforced poetry by Marsha Norman in her debut as a lyricist.
It is the saga of Mary Lennox, whose parents and friends die abruptly in a cholera epidemic. So she is shipped off to live with her Uncle Archie, a hunchback hermit having his own problems adjusting to the death of his wife in childbirth. What’s worse, little Mary reminds Archie of his dead wife, Lily (played by the elder Minyard, who mostly wafts through the proceedings as a ghostly apparition).
If the show’s original Broadway staging had a failing, it was that it was unnecessarily cluttered with ghost figures. Cholerton’s music stands-and-microphones concert cuts back on the spectral images, erring on the side of clarity.
Whether or not he chose The Secret Garden to allow Wayne LeGette a third opportunity to take on a role closely associated with Mandy Patinkin, the area performer is a standout as Archibald Craven, with several opportunities to apply his sweet quirky upper register sound. Shane Tanner came off a tad too much like The Addams’ Family’s Lurch for my taste as Archie’s evil brother, but he came on strong in the male-male duet with LeGette, In Lily’s Eyes, arguably the score’s best number.
Other standouts in the 17-member cast include Amy Miller Brennan as spunky chambermaid Martha and John Debkowski as her brother Dickon, the charismatic gardener with a rock star manner.
Caryl Ginsburg Fantel serves as music director and sole accompanist on keyboard, handling both with uncanny ease. Sean Lawson again supplies the scene-and-tone-setting photographic projections, moody black-and-white shots until the title garden is eventually revealed in Technicolor.
The Caldwell has had a very good, comeback season, extended now to include another winning Broadway concert.
THE SECRET GARDEN, Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, May 22. Tickets: $25-$35. Call: (561) 241-7432.