A Children's Haven of Healing

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE SECRET GARDEN Music by Lucy Simon; Lyrics and Book by Marsha Norman

When Tyne Daly took an afternoon off from rehearsing Gypsy to attend a musical down the street, she accosted its producer on the way in to demand, "You haven't ruined it, have you? I've loved the novel all my life." That ( same mix of gleeful anticipation and dread is felt by countless other, less celebrated patrons entering The Secret Garden, for many of whom it, rather than Miss Saigon, has been this season's most eagerly awaited Broadway show. Its source, a 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, appeals equally to sentimentalists infatuated with its Edwardian gothic setting and to New Age cultists and ecology freaks turned on by its messages of holistic healing and oneness with nature. The elegant, entrancing adaptation that opened last week will probably add another devoted following, those who delight in its sheer artistry. Vibrant and thought provoking to look at, melodic and poignant to hear, movingly acted and blessed with a dazzling 11-year-old star, this is the best American musical of the Broadway season. It is that rarest of entertainment, a story fascinating to children that unfolds in a manner both sophisticated and stimulating for adults.

Burnett's novel is beloved by girls, although not so much read by boys, and it fittingly has been translated by what is believed to be a Broadway first, an all-female creative team. Producer Heidi Landesman also designed the allegorical, imagistic set, based on a child's toy theater. Director Susan Schulman has laced the narrative with ghosts and wraiths of memory. Composer Lucy Simon blended folk music apt to the Yorkshire locale with art songs fitting the moneyed manor-house setting. Librettist-lyricist Marsha Norman solved the self-containment of the three main characters by making their songs vehicles for thoughts they would never merely speak. Although the creators stress their sensitivity to the book's fans, they were not revisiting childhood pleasures of their own; most remembered the book dimly, and Norman had never read it at all. They took a free hand with the sprawling, surprise- laden plot to highlight its theme of two troubled children healing themselves as adult intervention offers no help, just hindrance.

Daisy Eagan plays Mary Lennox, an orphan whose unloving parents died in a cholera epidemic in India. John Babcock, 14, plays her cousin Colin, a sickly boy kept locked away from chill winds and excitement in a room where he frets that he will be transmuted into a hunchback like his father. Mandy Patinkin plays the father, his deformity barely noticeable but his behavior conspicuously odd: he visits his son only when the boy is asleep, a quirk that never makes psychological sense. In the woods -- including the walled enclave of the title, cultivated by Colin's late mother and now closed up by his father -- live country folk who can talk to animals, notably the puckish Dickon (John Cameron Mitchell). The first act takes a long, slow time setting things up. The second act thrillingly resolves them. Like the novel, this adaptation rewards patience with a satisfying surge of emotion, a sense that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.