Positive Pruning : The women who created the Broadway hit 'The Secret Garden' have taken their show on the road--and done some strategic cropping

By DAVID COLKER

July 12, 1992 12 AM PT

<i> David Colker is a Times staff writer. </i>

The touring version of “The Secret Garden” is not quite the same show that opened on Broadway last year.

The road production, opening Wednesday at the Shubert Theatre in Century City, is almost 15 minutes shorter than the original. In addition to the cuts, which include the elimination of an entire scene, a few songs are rearranged, some of the choreography is reworked and the set, which won a Tony Award, is partly redesigned and downsized.

But according to critics who have seen both versions, as well as the creators of the musical, the audiences seeing the touring “Secret Garden” are not getting cheated. They are seeing a better show.

“We had wanted to make changes from the day the show opened,” said Lucy Simon, who composed “The Secret Garden” score. “But we didn’t really have the chance until the tour came around.

“It gave us a wonderful opportunity to make our wish list come true.”

The changes seem to be working. Although “Secret Garden” has done respectable business in New York, where it is still running on Broadway, the tour that began in Cleveland in April has been a smash hit at every stop. Indeed, some of the cities have requested a return engagement at the end of the planned year-and-a-half tour.

Albeit delayed, it’s a triumph for the show’s creators, including producer-set designer Heidi Landesman. Co-producer of the musicals “Big River” and “Into the Woods,” Landesman was looking for new projects when she heard a recording of a British musical adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the beloved Frances Hodgson Burnett novel published in 1911.

“It was awful,” said Landesman, speaking from her Upstate New York home. “But it sent me back to the novel I hadn’t read since I was a girl to see what was there. By the time I got to the end of it, I was sobbing.”

There had been several unsuccessful attempts to stage the novel--a favorite of little girls ever since it was published--about a cantankerous orphan girl named Mary sent to live with her distraught uncle in dreary Yorkshire. Both Mary and her uncle learn to embrace life through her discovery of a secret garden in the moors.

Landesman put together a creative team--playwright Marsha Norman to do the book and lyrics and Simon (sister of pop singer Carly Simon) to do the music--and they worked on adapting the novel’s plot.

“We thought that the story had to be told on stage from the child’s point of view,” Landesman said. “But about two-thirds through the novel, Mary drops out, and the story shifts to a little boy, Colin.

“We decided it would work better if Mary was the driving force in the story all the way through.”

Much has been made of the fact that the main producer and all key creators of the musical (including the director who later came aboard, Susan Schulman) are women, which goes against the norm on Broadway. Landesman said her team members were not chosen for their gender, but she does believe it made a difference.

“Some men might have been afraid of a story all told from the point of view of a little girl,” she said.

Their version of “The Secret Garden” debuted as a reading at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the summer of 1989. Later that year, it was staged at the Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk. After seeing it on its feet, they reworked the show, and Schulman, best known for her direction of a Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” was brought onto the team.

Expectations were high--Landesman and the other producers had so little trouble raising the $6.1-million budget for Broadway that they found themselves in the rare position of turning investors away. Another tryout was scheduled to work out the last kinks, to be mounted in 1990 during the first season of New Musicals in Purchase, N.Y., an eagerly awaited venture aimed at helping to launch new works.

Unfortunately, “The Secret Garden” was the second show on the New Musicals schedule. The first, an adaptation of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” was such a critical and financial disaster that New Musicals went belly-up.

“I called every regional theater in the country to see if we could fit into their schedule, and it was just too late,” Landesman said. They instead worked on it with the cast at a New York rehearsal studio and performed the show without sets or costumes for invited audiences. But it just wasn’t the same, according to Simon.

“You know there are some story points that are not quite working, but you think, ‘When we get it up there with the sets and costumes, that will take care of them,’ ” said the composer, who was doing her first Broadway show. “But it just doesn’t.”

Once the full-blown show finally did get on stage at the St. James Theatre on Broadway, problems became apparent, Norman said, especially with the opening scenes. “Once you are up there with the set and the costumes and especially the orchestra, it’s not so easy to make changes,” said the playwright, known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning “ ‘night Mother.”

“It’s not just you and your buddies trying things out, anymore. Changes involving music have to get orchestrated and rehearsed, and that can take 48 hours. Working with an orchestra is like trying to maneuver quick with an 18-wheeler.

“And we were running out of time.”

The show had to open by late April to be eligible for that season’s Tony Awards. It’s an important consideration--winning Tonys can mean a big box-office boost, and the televised awards show provides national exposure.

The musical opened April 25, 1991, to some good but mostly mixed reviews. Some critics complained that the show lacked focus and was at times confusing. Some said that Landesman’s elaborate set dwarfed the action.

At the Tony Awards, “The Secret Garden” was overshadowed “Will Rogers Follies,” although Landesman won for the set, Norman won for the book and Daisy Eagan, who played Mary, took home the award for best supporting actress.

Rehearsals for the tour began almost exactly a year after the Broadway opening, giving the creators plenty of time to mull over their “wish list.” “Most of the changes had to do with clarifying story points right in the beginning,” said Schulman, speaking from Houston, where she was directing a new and revised production of “Annie Get Your Gun.”

“It’s a story that is told through dreams and visions much of the time, which is how children operate,” she said. “They are less literal-minded, more accepting of fantasy. But we had to clarify that and stay with the little girl right from the start.”

A couple of songs were retooled.

“There is a song, ‘Round Shouldered Man,’ which was a solo for the little boy that should have packed a big emotional impact,” said Norman, speaking from her home on Long Island. “But a little boy’s voice can’t carry that kind of emotion in a big theater. Lucy always wanted to make it a duet for Mary and the boy, but I could not make that work for the story.

“We found a way of doing it so that it could not only be a duet for the two of them but also advance the story and emotional life of both characters. It gets a much bigger response.”

The story and song changes worked out so well, the creators thought, that they put them into the Broadway production as well.

The set had to be scaled down for the tour to fit into some of the theaters and to travel more easily. Landesman is still smarting from some critics’ assertions that as producer she let her set design dominate the show on Broadway, though she concedes that the tour set works better. “I got the chance to work on parts of it that I didn’t think were particularly successful in New York,” Landesman said. “The night garden scene was completely redesigned, and I think it is much more effective.”

All the machinations have not put any of the creators off musicals. Landesman is developing new projects as a producer, and she designed the set for the “Annie Get Your Gun” that Schulman is directing. Later this year, Schulman will stage a run-through of the new musical “ ‘39” that is set during the New York World’s Fair of 1939. It has a score of songs by the late composer Harold Arlen and a book by former television writer Julie Kirgo.

Simon composed the music for an adaptation of the Erica Jong novel “Fanny Hackabout Jones” that was produced last summer at the Long Wharf regional theater in New Haven, Conn., and is now being revised. And Norman is collaborating with famed composer Jule Styne on a musical adaptation of the beloved, romantic 1948 film “The Red Shoes.”

“This is just where I want to be, in the world of musicals,” said Norman, whose plays are dramatic and often dark. “People didn’t know that about me, but when I was sitting alone in Kentucky, writing those first plays, this is what I dreamed about. But a musical is not something that you can do alone. It takes collaborators, and now I have them.

“I see it as my mission in life to take people’s favorite stories and figure out how to make them work as musicals.”