Stage

...For that is the line run's purpose: it's a last-minute step towards making the performers so fluent that opening night jitters won't make them go blank once the curtain goes up...

...The corollary of residential segregation is school racial separation...

...This obviousness suggests that the opera is kidding the original, which is not the intention...

...In the meantime, the fact of "separate but equal" schools remains a problem with only partial solutions...

...Craven, Archibald's wonderfully inept cousin in the novel, has been promoted to brother, providing belated sibling rivalry...

...Finally, however, I was simply sucked into the story, rooting for Mary and Colin and Dickon and the magic they were working in the garden...

...The only reason that I can see for turning the character into a villain (indifference is so much more frightening than villainy) is that it provides a role for the estimable Robert Westenberg (the Big Bad Wolf from Into the Woods...

...But if you harbor a perverse desire to be present at such a rehearsal, just betake yourself to A Kiss Before Dying, the latest 406: Commonweal...

...Although the show has three attractive performers in what should be the three leading roles (Daisy Eagan has deservedly been much praised as Mary Lennox), the children are upstaged by adults, living and dead...

...It is certainly much easier to read than Gene Stratton Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost, another popular turn-of-the-century redemprion-and-reconciliation novel that I struggled with recently...

...Louis...

...The opera version of the work (music by Greg Pliska, libretto by David Ives) was presented by the Pennsylvania Operatic Theater in March...

...Finally, to those who are concerned that OCSD v. Dowell represents backsliding, it should be noted that the case merely recognizes what has been afait accompli in big cities for many years...

...Both the opera and the musical have their virtues, but if it is Bumett's Secret Garden you want to see, check your video store for the film...

...Happily, however, a number of suburban districts have opened their schools to city children either through metropolitanizafion, as in Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, or through city-suburban agreements, as in Milwaukee, Boston, Louisville, and St...

...Of course, this is hindsight...

...That is a contemporary reaction...

...but The Secret Garden needs real children...

...both were/are in love with the dead Lily's eyes (see the song of that title) and 14 June 1991:405 S.E...

...My uneducated ear seemed at times to get a hint of Sondheim, and the piece could certainly have used some of that composer's sardonic force and a touch of his into-the-woods joy...

...After all, Bumett's greatest accomplishment in the novel--even more than her recognition that every child needs a secret garden--is her child's view of the world in which all adults are either indifferent or incompetent...

...The word "run" is precise for the actors usually race through the script, deliberately discarding the inflections and pauses that have evolved during rehearsals and that will be revived on opening night...

...Colin, by the way, was an extremely healthy looking invalid in the person of Peter Gillis, which was one of the problems for me...

...There is a great deal of singing about trying to find the secret garden, which turns out not to be difficult since the book's buried key is hanging from a tree limb here and the discovery of the hidden entrance is the exclamation, "There's the door...

...The most effective scene theatrically--and musically, for that matter--had nothing to do with the secret garden...

...The Secret Garden was never a boy's book, and it is probably not best to come to it for the fn'st rime, as I did, as a sixty-five-year-old boy...

...The score, as Silverstein indicates in the theater newsletter, is a blend of styles, but it is oddly bland...

...For that, you might well turn to the 1984 BBC adaptation of the book in which film can show the changing garden, can let us see and almost touch Dickon's animals and the robin which leads Mary to the garden...

...Unfortunately, no reversal ofMiUiken v. Bradley, which might require integration between city and suburban school districts, is on the horizon...

...At the same time, it must also be recognized that many schools exclusively serving black children will be with us for the calculable future--certainly as long as there is a degree of segregated housing-and that these schools must be better financed...

...That does away with the moment which"frue Gardenites will insist is the most important one in the book, when Mary enters the garden alone and thinks the dormant plants are dead...

...Only a reversal or a reappraisal of Milliken v. Bradley will more completely integrate city schools...

...Although the process may be admirable (it bears more than a slight resemblance to the present workshop-to-Broadway development of musical comedies), the result is a static work in which set pieces replace dramatic action...

...Of course citizens have the right to move and thus to some degree to frustrate the desegregation rulings of federal courts...

...It was Mary's wandering through the nearly deserted mansion in which the small chorus, manipulating mirrors, could suggest the portrait gallery and the extent of Mary's solitariness...

...Why's it coming back, always a succubus...

...That scene isn't on Broadway either...

...Jordan or Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life (without their heavenly credentials...

...dybbuk, ! go on mouthing about...

...But she is only the most prominent of the ghosts that haunt the play...

...More than simply a commission, it was a collaborative effort...

...STAGE LOST IN TRANSLATION 'THE SECRET GARDEN(S)' udging by the number of editions of Frances Hodgson Bumett's The Secret Garden currently in print, there are a great many ten-year-old girls out there discovering the book and identifying with Mary Lennox, the novel's touchy heroine...

...Mary's parents, her Indian servants, and various unidentified waltzers float in with great frequency and make scenes difficult to perceive...

...Of course, if you were ever to blunder into a line run, you would swear that you had never seen such colorless, such toneless, such spunkless actors in your entire life...

...The book's theme about the reinvigorating power of nature and the great chain of being as a kind of daisy chain in which plants, animals, and people join hands seems particularly pertinent in the age of ozone depletion...

...Set bound, the opera could not present the garden until the end of the play, when a crumpled, discolored canvas was removed to reveal a pastel garden set, which means that the three children have to discover the garden at once...

...Both recognize that the dressing scene between her and Mary is a natural for a musical number...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN LETHAL SMOOCHES 'KISS' & 'MORTAL THOUGHTS' couple of days before a play opens, its cast usually meets in a rehearsal room or a hallway for what is called a"line run...

...On stage, there are problems with the garden itself...

...I never expected to feel protective toward the book, but I did, which was altogether the wrong state of mind to approach the two new stage adaptations...

...Pliska and Ives had worked since 1987 with Barbara Silverstein, the artistic director of the company who was also conductor and musical director of the performance, with Michael Montel, the stage director, and with company singers to test the musical and theatrical viability of scenes, music, lyrics...

...A note in the New York Times on May 3 indicated that, even though the show was open and running, the producers were planning to cut back on the intrusive ghosts to make things clearer for children, an important element in potential audiences...

...An orphan (read, child who feels isolated), she discovers the secret garden and there creates her own family--flora, fauna, and a few choice human beings...

...In a work like Ravel' s L'enfant et les sortil~ges, an adult can sing the bratty child effectively since other grown-ups are singing furniture, trees, and frogs...

...Swallowing's strenuous, some throat nearly closing over from so much emptiness, nausea, an acidic gullet and its limb lump, that .sacrifice required to slump away from the phantom trap...

...No director is present or needed, only an assistant stage manager holding the prompt book to make sure everyone is word perfect...

...Mead Amputations Without anesthesia, walking sticks behind a cyclone fence getting through most days on only one bowl of porridge...

...he Secret Garden, on Broadway, is a handsome and often appearing show, but Marsha Norman, who did the book and lyrics, is only minimally interested in Bumett's novel...

...Both musical versions of the book recognize the vitality of Martha (Dickon's sister, the chambermaid who looks after Mary) as a character and keep her on hand for the f'mal triumph in the garden...

...During the act ! was a scream, merely, whereas m~w hands, kindly, sensitive tips, occasionally rai~ a spoon, check the gauze for drainage and life has resumed a small suggestion of humanity, that hope, exhausted gratitude still doing all it can with hurt just a tfac-) for I am black (tor) a kind of indian in this land from which (con-) my blood (stant) must be cut Neville thinks the estate should have come to him and may yet if he can persuade Colin that he is sick enough to die...

...We get more of the garden there, although Heidi Landesman's charmingly theatrical sets never evoke the real magic that Bumett had in mind...

...The regenerative power of spring is muted here, although the miracle-gro song to encourage the dead-looking garden to blossom ("seed rise up and meet the sun") is reprised to get the sickly Colin to his feet ("Colin rise up and meet the sun...

...But the sentimental passages were obvious to me, as they would not have been to the book's proper audience, and I could not help feeling that the book should not have ended in the embrace of the Cravens, father and son, but that Archibald should have been had up for child abuse...

...They also falsify one of Burnett's central points--that Mary, surrounded by people in India, was as isolated as when she is alone in Yorkshire...

...Bumett simply forgot her...

...There was a vice, straps and the blade blacking out everything but the pain gunny sack breathed till to suffocate sounded like .salvation...

...The production did not have the budget for the expensive elegance of the Broadway musical...

...If the children have to edge their way around the brothers to get to their own story, they also have to face the beneficent interference of the dead Lily, who is as busy as Mr...

...The new main plot is how Archibald (Mandy Pantinkin) finally comes to terms with the death of his wife (Rebecca Luker) and incidentally rediscovers his son...