The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden follows a girl left orphaned and shipped across the world to an uncle who does not want her, into a vast cold house where one door has been locked for ten years. Mary Lennox is difficult, unloved and entirely alone, and she is the only person willing to ask what happened here.

Behind the locked door is a walled garden abandoned since her aunt died in it. Upstairs, hidden away, is a cousin nobody mentions, kept in bed and told he is dying. Mary sets about reviving both. The house is crowded with the dead, who watch and sing and will not let the living move on, and the question the show keeps asking is whether grief can be tended back into something living.

The music is by Lucy Simon, with book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, adapted from the 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It reached the stage in 1991, ran for 709 performances and took Tony Awards for its book and its design. Its most distinctive invention is the chorus of ghosts, who hold the story's memory and sing what the living cannot say.

The score is lush and unusually demanding, built on soaring duets and layered ensemble writing rather than easy hooks. The tone is darker than the source's reputation suggests: this is a story about mourning as much as about a garden, and it does not rush the recovery. The moment the garden comes back is the payoff the whole evening is built toward.

It suits families with older children, audiences who like a big romantic score, and anyone drawn to stories about houses with something wrong in them. Live, the ghosts standing at the edges of every scene do something no recording can reproduce.