The Secret Garden
Reviews
The Australian
Tuesday August 1, 1995
Marina Prior is beautiful and liquid-voiced as Lily, the dead mother whose spirit haunts her lost family. As the deformed and tormented Archibald Craven, Anthony Warlow performs sympathetically and is in splendid voice - or rather several splendid voices, producing moving variations in dramatic mood and emotion, as in his solo A Bit of Earth. Philip Quast, everybody's favourite complex villain, is his dark-side brother, and their duet Lily's Eyes rises to operatic emotional heights. Class acts, every one.
Financial Review
Friday August 4 1995
Anthony Warlow's voice reaches
ineffably to counter-tenor in Archibald's
poignant song to his sleeping son 'Race
You To The Top of The Morning'. "Spell-binding" takes on
heightened meaning with his 'A Bit of Earth' when Mary's
request for a garden begins to invade his desolate interior life,
despite his brother Neville (Philip Quast) who hopes to inherit
house and land. Marina Prior's voice is delicate and clear
toned as ever. Her duet with Colin, 'come to My Garden' is a
musical, and thematic centrepiece. But the crowning vocal
achievement is the Act One duet between Anthony Warlow
and Philip Quast - Lily's Eyes - where their voices reach
orchestral pitch.
THE SUN-HERALD
"In adapting Frances Hodgson Burnett's story, the writer and lyricist Martha Norman makes curious choices. That she should expand certain adult roles - Archibald Craven (Anthony Warlow) and Dr. Neville Craven (Philip Quast) makes theatrical sense..... but far less explicable is her change of the narrative and symbolic focus of the story; the regenerative power of nature revealed through Mary's transformation on the Yorkshire moors and - a major part of the story - through Colin's gradual rehabilitation. "On this decorative Edwardian childhood stage there are splendid voices - and this is a work that is substantially music. Although there's little scope for the establishment of character beyond broad outline, Prior, Quast and Warlow sing superbly."
THE AGE
FRIDAY DECEMBER 23 1995
RICH, UPLIFTING FANTASYThe Secret Garden was a musical just waiting to happen. It's a rich and impressive production that appeals to all ages, writes Helen Thompson.
It will delight both adults and children, not least because of its star performers, Anthony Warlow, Marina Prior and Philip Quast, who give this production a polish and vocal distinctiveness that lift a slight story into a happy fairy tale with a genuine lump-in-the-throat ending.
When Mary Lennox wakes up to her new status as an orphan, it is difficult to know whether she has dreamed her old life, or whether her new one is real or not. The stage production uses this starting point to give us a cast of ghosts who float on and off the stage, watching over Mary. They are joined by her Aunt Lily, the dead wife of her Uncle Archibald to whom she is sent in Yorkshire. The dead are there as presences for as long as they are mourned by the living.
The first half of the show is rather gloomy and static, but it is winter in Yorkshire as well as in the hearts of Archibald and Mary. The set, a remarkable facsimile of the favourite decoupage of the Edwardians, layers of crowded illustrations pasted thickly over a surface then varnished, gives just the right flavour of claustrophobic artifice. It is a triumph of lighting when this is transformed, in the second act, into the luxuriously blooming secret garden.
There are some very fine voices among the cast. The duet sung by Anthony Warlow and Philip Quast, Lily's Eyes, was superb. Warlow gave a feeling but not sentimentalized portrait of the widower nearly made mad by his grief, and Quast played the villain with a subtlety that suggested a man who doesn't himself really understand his motives.
The secret garden that Mary and her friend Dickon bring back to life, restoring with it the health of her crippled cousin Colin, is kept a secret from us as well. The show, and its songs, concentrate on the psychological processes of healing, matched by seasonal renewal and helped along by magic. One of the finest scenes was that between Mary and the servant Martha, when Susan-Ann Walker stiffened Mary's resistance to oppression with the song Hold On.
The children, Sarah Ogden as Mary and Ross Hannaford as Colin really shone in their scene of spell casting, Come Spirit, Come Charm, when Mary, like a whirling dervish, summons up Colin's will to live out of the very air.
This is a show packed with impressive performances, easy on the eye and the ear, which transforms a rather static original story into a richly imagined fantasy, it's emotional integrity guaranteeing that feel-good factor, just right for the holiday season.