After having seen this dramatization of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 children's novel staged too often as a “children's musical,” I was a little leery about coming to see another production of a children's play guaranteed to scare the liver out of any kid who saw it. I know it would have scared the liver out of me when I was a kid. I guess that may have been the state-of-the-art for writers of children's literature in the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries -- Look at the St. Louis Poet, Eugene Field and such poems as “Little Boy Blue” about a child who dies in his sleep and his toys are left untouched forever -- or Margery Williams' The Velveteen Rabbit for a couple of real tear-jerkers which did anything but entertain me as a child. The damned things gave me nightmares! Burnett became established as a children's novelist when she wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy and became a dabbler in spiritualism after the death of her son in 1890. These two interests seem to take form in her most famous work, The Secret Garden, published in 1911 and made into the Norman/Simon musical in 1991.

And so it was that I came to the Bremmer Conference Center on the campus of the Danville Area Community College last night to audit yet another production of The Secret Garden. And in this production, I obtained a whole new respect for the play, realizing that it was not simply a spooky children's play, but a wonderful love story which manages to bridge both sides of life and death. I saw a secret garden that I had never seen before and I was captivated. Those who know me will tell you that it is on the rarest of occasions that I give even good productions a standing ovation -- but I was on my feet clapping and cheering at the end of this play. I heard some guy crying “Bravo” and I wondered who the hell he was; then I realized, he was me.

I was particularly impressed by the musicality of the score. The strength and operatic qualities of the duets, trios, quartets and sextets were, to use a badly overused word, awesome. This, of course, could not have been accomplished had it not been for an extremely talented cast and extremely talented directors. Director Greg Williams obviously realized this play was not just a bit of spooky ghost stories for kids, and managed to bring out the dramatic adult quality of the love story of Archibald Craven (Michael Steen) and the sprit of his dead wife, Lily (Jodi L. Prosser). Steen and Prosser possess voices of operatic quality that will thrill even the most jaded theatre-goer, and their final love duet in Act II, Scene 9 (“How Could I Ever Know”) is enough to scald your heart. I would be hard put to find its equal in La Boheme .

Yet Prosser and Steen are not the only exceptional singing talents in the show. Marah Sotelo (Rose Lennox), Ian Williams (Capt. Albert Lennox), Julia Megan Sullivan (Mrs. Medlock) and Chris Dunn (Ben Weatherstaff) all contribute highly in supporting roles. Matt Hester (Dr. Neville Craven), Libby A. Mueller (Martha) and David Zych (Dickon) are all excellent in their principal supporting roles. And, at this point, I might point out that while the programme does not list a dialect coach, whoever coached Mueller, Dunn and Zych in a Yorkshire accent deserves special credit. A Yorkshire dialect (along with a Cornish one) is one of the most difficult of all the English dialects to master, and while theirs was not perfect, it was certainly sufficient enough for East Central Illinois.

And then there were the children -- Bailey Williams as Mary, the scared and confused orphaned daughter of Rose and Captain Lennox, and Patrick Strader as Colin, the sickly son of Archibald. Not only were their voices brilliant, but so was their acting and so was the chemistry between their characters. This was an example of the best child acting and singing that I have seen in a long time.

Chris Krukewitt as the Fakir and Lisa Burgess as the Ayah provided a beautifully costumed pair of mysterious character parts, bringing home to the audience the mystery of Colonial India.

But most of all was the music -- truly operatic in its drama, its quality and its strength. Musical Director Belinda Smith is certainly to be congratulated. With seven duets, two trios, two quartets, one sextet and many full company numbers, the sound emitting from the stage was truly operatic and wonderfully enjoyable. The only problem was an occasional audio imbalance during the company numbers and one incident of electronic feedback, which did not bother me at all.

Something that also did not bother me, due to the excellence of Michael Steen's acting ability, was the apparent absence of the referred to hump on his back. The fact that Archibald is supposed to be a hunchback seemed important to Frances Hodgson Burnett, but it was not really all that important to the story. Whenever it was mentioned, all I could think of was Marty Feldman's moving hump on his back in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, and when Gene Wilder suggested he have it remove, Feldman's character's answer was “What hump?” And so it was with Archibald's hump; when mentioned, I was tempted to say, “What hump?” I really think I liked Archibald more without his hump than I have when I have seen the character with a hump, looking something like either Quasimodo or like he had put his jacket on over his backpack.

The one problem that I wish could have been fixed dealt with the large picture frames located upstage. Generally they were covered with opaque scrims, but were then back-lit so they would become transparent and we could see family portraits of the dead members of the Lennox and Craven families. This was a stunning theatrical device and certainly heightened the notion of their being ghostly. However, I wish that someone would have checked the sight lines from the audience a little better. We were sitting third row, house right, and when the scrim was back-lighted, I could see Capt. Lennox, in the stage-right frame, clearly outside the scrim. I imagine my audience mates on the house left side of the auditorium was having a similar problem with the stage left frame and the actors in it. This could have easily been corrected with the addition of a black flat running upstage from each edge of the frame. This was really the only distracting thing I encountered while auditing this extremely enjoyable production.

But a major problem has nothing to do with staging, acting, music, or directing. It is the extremely short run of the Danville Light Opera productions -- they do only three productions per season and only three performances each. If all of their productions reach the quality of The Secret Garden, this is far to few. I'd love to see a season longer than three productions, but there may well be real reasons for that. But I can see no real reason for limiting each run to a mere three performances -- Friday night, Saturday night and a Sunday matinee. Unfortunately, most of those of you who are reading this review will not be able to see this fine production, and that is a sin and a shame. I urge all of you who missed it (and those who didn't as well) to urge the D.L.O. Board of Directors (I understand an election is coming up shortly) to run their productions for at least two weekends. They deserve it.