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The Secret Garden

Synopsis of Scenes

ACT I
Opening: India, 1906
“Opening Dream” Lily, Fakir, Mary and Company
“There’s a Girl” Company
The Library at Misselthwaite Mannor, Yorkshire, England
“The House Upon the Hill” Company
Mary’s Room The Gallery
“I Heard Someone Crying” Mary, Archibald, Lily & Company
Scene 1: Mary’s Sitting Room
“A Fine White Horse” Martha
Scene 2: The Ballroom
“A Girl in the Valley” Lily, Archibald & Dancers
Scene 3: In the Maze/The Greenhouse
“It’s a Maze”. Ben, Mary, Dickon & Martha
The Edge of the Moor
“Winter’s on the Wing” Dickon
“Show Me the Key” Mary & Dickon
Scene 4: Archibald’s Library
“A Bit of Earth” Archibald
Scene 5: The Gallery
“Storm I” Company
“Lily’s Eyes” Archibald & Neville
Scene 6: The Hallway
“Storm II” Mary & Company
Scene 7: Colin’s Room
“Round-Shouldered Man” Colin
Scene 8: On the Grounds/ The Door to the Garden
“Final Storm” Company

ACT II
Scene 1: The Tea Party Dream/The Other Side of the Door
“The Girl I Mean to Be” Mary & Company
Scene 2: Archibald’s Dressing Room
“Quartet” Archibald, Neville, Rose & Lily
Scene 3: Colin’s Room
“Race You to the Top of the Morning” .Archibald
Scene 4: The Greenhouse
“Wick” Dickon & Mary
Scene 5: Colin’s Room
“Come to My Garden” Lily & Colin
Scene 6: In the Maze/The Garden
“Come Spirit, Come Charm” Mary, Martha, Dickon, Fakir, Ayah, Lily & Company
Scene 7: The Library
“Disappear” Neville
Scene 8: Mary’s Room/Paris
“Hold On” Martha
“Letter Song” Mary & Martha
Scene 9: Archibald’s Rooms in Paris
“Where in the World” Archibald
“How Could I Ever Know” Lily & Archibald
Scene 10: The Garden
Finale Company

The Story*
Mary Lennox has no one left in the world when she arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, her mysterious uncle’s enormous, drafty mansion looming on the edge of the moors. A cholera epidemic has ravaged the Indian Village in which she was born, killing both her parents and the “Ayah”, or Indian servant, who cared for her. Not that being alone is new to her. Her socialite mother had no time between parties for Mary, and her father was both too ill and too occupied by his work to raise his daughter. Not long after coming to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, Mary discovers a walled garden, neglected and in ruins. Soon she meets her servant Martha’s brother Dickon, a robust country boy nourished both by his mother’s love and by the natural surrounding of the countryside; and her tyrannical cousin Colin, whose mother died giving birth to him. So traumatized was Archibald by the sudden death of his beloved wife Lily, that he effectively abandoned the infant Colin and hid the keys to the garden that she adored. His son has grown into a self-loathing hypochondriacal child whose tantrums strike fear into the hearts of servants. The lush garden is now overgrown and all are forbidden to enter it. No one can even remember where the door is, until a robin leads Mary to its hidden key. It is in the “secret garden” and with the help of Dickon, that Mary and Colin find the path to physical and spiritual health. Along the way the three children discover that in their imaginations, called “magic” by Colin, is the power to transform lives.

*(Penguin Putnam, Inc.)

Director’s Notes
A Personal Note
While reading the novel, The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, for the first time last summer, it was as if I knew it by heart. I appreciated the loneliness Mary and Colin felt, and understood their excitement and fascination with their “secret garden”. To me there is nothing quite like having a secret hideaway or like watching something I planted actually grow and live. It gives me power and strength and renews my spirit. It really is a bit like magic.

Many people find solace in nature. For some the hours seem to fly by with their hands in the earth planting, weeding, harvesting, and smelling the fresh, moist earth; the aroma of plants and flowers lingering in their nostrils. Worldly concerns seem to vanish.

Burnett believed in the healing effects of gardens. Something she wrote while propped up in bed during her last illness seems to express this belief.

“As long as one has a garden one has a future; and as long as
one has a future one is alive”.

Please take a moment to read through the commentary on Marsha Norman’s adaptation of The Secret Garden which can be seen as an insert to the program.
Jonel Langenfeld-Rial
Director and Choreographer

Special Thanks
LifeStyles Center; Mike Weirich and Tod Butler of Specialized Audio-Visual for wireless microphones; Julie Blissert, Director and Tim Nekritz, Public Affairs; Pam Lavallee; Box Office Staff; Mary Jean’s Tux Rentals, Jeanette Reyner; Pat Van Wie.
To my parents who instilled in me a love for the earth and
all the magic it can hold- Jonel.

Additional Information

The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett; A Brief Synopsis

Frances Hodgson, author of the novel, The Secret Garden, was born on November 24, 1924 in Manchester England. Following her father’s death in 1854, she and her family moved to rural America. The move from industrial England was a journey to a green, natural world that would become a central theme in many of Burnett’s later works, including The Secret Garden.

Before moving to America, the Burnett family lived temporarily with relatives, where five-year-old Frances enjoyed a garden. Her recollection of the garden will contribute to the magic aura of the garden in The Secret Garden. Another move took Frances and her family to an iron-gated square of once-imposing houses, now surrounded by the overcrowded lodgings of mill workers employed in the smut-spewing factories nearby. Always admonished to speak and act like a “lady”, Frances was forbidden to play with the mill workers’ children, but she surreptitiously used their dialect much as Mary and Colin learn Dickon’s Yorkshire, in the novel. While living in this place, Frances discovered a walled garden and imagined a carpet of flowers replacing its refuse and weeds; this experience anticipates Mary’s discovery of the locked garden. It is around this time that Frances began to write.

Manchester’s economy plummeted, in part because the American Civil War interfered with the shipments of cotton needed in British textile mills. Frances’s mother then sold the business, which she had been trying to run on her own, and moved to live with her brother in Tennessee. The family arrived in war-raved Tennessee and moved into an abandoned log cabin in rural New Market. Frances, almost 16, met Swan Burnett, son of the local doctor.

Frances’s family next moved to an even more isolated house, closer to Knoxville; here a mountain thicket she called her “Bower” provided solitude and stired her imagination. Time passed and Frances had two sons named Lionel and Vivian. In 1877 the Burnett’s moved to Washington D.C., where Swan established a medical practice. Frances continued to write and began to publish her novels which did well in both England and America. She also adapted some of her fiction for the stage. As a child she used to love to play-act for her friends and family.

Life in D.C. became difficult and strains developed within Frances’s marriage. In 1884 she became ill and unable to write. She was treated by a mind healer in Boston, where Mary Baker Eddy had just helped establish the first Church of Christ Scientist. Burnett never became a Christian Scientist, but she accepted some of its beliefs, which are reflected in the healing role, attributed to mental attitude and natural medicine in The Secret Garden. In 1890 her son, Lionel, died of consumption at age 16. Burnett went into a long period of mourning. Partly in Lionel’s memory, she increased her charitable works for sick and poor children in London. Her experience with her son and in children’s hospitals provided insights later used in her portrayal of sickly Mary and Colin.

Frances eventually divorced her husband and moved with her other son, Vivian (then a Harvard graduate in journalism) to Maytham Hall, Rolvenden, Kent. At Maytham she turned a walled, overgrown orchard into a rose garden, where she often sat to write. It was in this garden that she got her first ideas for The Secret Garden. Frances’s continued grief over her son Lionel’s death is reflected in another book, In the Closed Room, portraying a dead child’s attempts to let her surviving mother know that she is happy. The paradisiacal garden in which the dead child plays anticipates the association of the garden and death in The Secret Garden.

In 1909 Frances moved into her new home on Long Island, in the garden of which she wrote much of The Secret Garden. The novel began as a serial in The American Magazine in 1910 and was published as a book in 1911. Frances died on October 29, 1924 and is best remembered for this book that was published almost 40 years earlier.

*(Taken from “The Secret Garden”/Lesson Plans/Family Education Network(Internet source)


Marsha Norman and The Secret Garden; A commentary on Norman’s adaptation of the original novel.
Taken from “This Haunted Girl”
Lisa Tyler
Marsha Norman’s adaptation of The Secret Garden is startlingly faithful to the original novel. In many instances, Norman chose to use Burnett’s dialogue with few or no alterations. The play, like Burnett’s book, is “preoccupied with death”; in fact, Norman prides herself on the play’s honesty.

Norman has noticed that children are curious about death, which they encounter in everything from Saturday morning cartoons to Bambi.

“It’s one of those great, powerful subjects that children want to see because it’s part of the world,” Norman said. “They don’t want to be lied to about it.”

“Most adults won’t talk about it,” she added. “Well, we do.”

Despite the faithfulness of the adaptation, however, Norman has altered the original material in her work. There are some changes which include an expanded role for Archibald Craven, a reconfiguring of Mary’s relationship with her parents, a diminished role for both Colin’s mother and the secret garden itself, the elimination of Mrs. Sowerby as a character, and of course, the presence of the controversial and sometimes confusing ghosts. The net effect of Norman’s changes is to focus the plot on a man exorcising the ghost of his dead wife, rather than on the children who have been damaged by emotional neglect resurrecting themselves and each other through their nurturing of an apparently dead garden.

Several of these changes were developed and refined during the musical’s evolution from a draft into a Broadway production. According to the play’s program, producer and set designer Heidi Landesman first came up with the idea of doing a musical version of the novel after a friend sent her a sound track album of a British musical based on the book. She didn’t care for the British version but was nonetheless prompted to reread Burnett’s novel.

Landsman invited Norman to draft a libretto. Composer Lucy Simon joined the team soon after, and the play then went through several stages of development, beginning with a staged reading in the summer of 1989 at the Skidmore College Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York. After revision by Norman and Simon, the play was given a trial production at the Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk, Virginia. Director Susan Schulman signed on at that point and helped revise the play further.

The play was believed to be the first Broadway production generated by an all-female creative team. Despite mixed reviews, the 1991 production won three Tony Awards, including one for Norman’s book and lyrics.
Perhaps in part because so many talented women were involved in the creation of the musical, Norman made several changes in her adaptation that would probably strike modern-day feminists readers as salutary. Colin does not take over the play as he does the novel and in the plays final spoken lines, it is Mary’s achievement that is recognized, not Colin’s as in the book. Moreover, in Norman’s version, it is Mary, and not Colin who has Lily’s eyes, as Archibald and Neville Craven note in one of the songs in the play. This change was evidently the result of a conscious refocusing of the play on Mary.

Although the shift in emphasis from Colin’s character to Mary’s now seems justified, the shift in emphasis from the children to the adults is more troubling. In the novel, it is “the behavior of the children” that is “the proper focus of our interest”. Archibald Craven, Mary’s uncle, appears only briefly near the beginning of the novel and then again at the end. In the play he appears throughout. Neville Craven, (who has been transformed from Archibald’s relatively unimportant, vaguely villainous cousin into an openly malevolent brother) threatens to send Mary to school.

Norman presents Mary’s loss of her parents as traumatic and painful. This represents a dramatic departure from Burnett’s novel, in which Mary’s psychological problem is not grief but apathy, an affectlessness generated by her neglectful parents. Mary is apparently so traumatized by the loss of her parents that she has repressed her memories of the cholera epidemic; when she is scolded by Mrs. Medlock and Dr. Craven for speaking to Colin, “Mary begins to remember exactly what happened at that dinner party”.

It is the presence of these ghosts that constitutes the most obvious difference between Burnett’s novel and Norman’s adaptation. It is these characters who, after a brief bit of song from Lily Craven, open the play with their stylized dance of death, to symbolize their abrupt deaths from a cholera epidemic. But they do not disappear in death; rather they remain present as a chorus until the final scene of the play. It is the Dreamers who establish the eerie gothic atmosphere of Misselthwaite Manor and seem to haunt it themselves. In the novel it is only Colin’s mother who appears as a ghost and her one act is to call Archibald home from Europe to rediscover his newly healthy son.