Growing the Secret Garden

Clusters of crocus, purple and gold …

Blankets of pansies, up from the cold.

Her music pours over the darkened audience, effortless, haunting. She’s sung this before; she knows it well. Her silhouette is fuzzy, like an old-time memory, but her words ring clear as drops of dew on the petals in her garden.

Lilies and iris, safe from the chill …

Behind her, invisible, dozens of figures scurry about, frantically lacing corsets, spraying hair, dabbing on powder, running last-minute lines. This single moment has danced in their heads for months, while they ate their morning bowl of cereal, when they walked the dog, before they drifted to sleep. Now, until the curtain falls, and the final bows are taken, and the emptied theater falls to echoes again, each precious second is accounted for.

"If," says director Dallas Dunnagan, "everybody’s done their homework."

She and the rest of the cast and crew for The Naples Players’ production of The Secret Garden have already clocked countless hours—weeks—months rehearsing, building sets, constructing costumes, blocking scenes, designing lighting, even rearranging entire chunks of the music score. They know the next hour or so as if it’s their own child, and in a way, it’s just like that. If they’ve done it right, what they’ve created is continuous, flowing, natural, and few besides themselves know what’s happened along the way to make it so. Until now.

Here is a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how a production comes together—the stuff you’ll never see in the spotlight.

In the beginning, there was a notebook

On an afternoon in April, a small crowd files into the conference room of Sugden Community Theatre. The space is overwhelmingly blue, with a long, blue table and blue floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Through the second-story window, the sky over Fifth Avenue South cheerily mimics the hue. Present are the designing minds behind nearly every element of the musical, each nearly bursting with ideas that will bring the scripts scattered across the table to life.

Dunnagan presides at the head of the table, a fat, tan notebook peppered with fluorescent Post-It tabs propped open in front of her.

"Do you have your Secret Garden notebook already?" asks Matt Flynn, who will design the play’s scenery. "That’s a lot of stuff." Dunnagan nods. This is the second time she’s directed this show, which tells the story of a 10-year-old orphan whose parents die suddenly and leave her to live with her reclusive, troubled uncle in England. The first production was in 1994 when she ran a professional theater company on Hilton Head, S.C. This performance will be a little different, since all of The Naples Players except the production staff are volunteers.

"Here’s what I think is really important," she begins. "Marrying the reason the ghosts are there with the story we’re trying to tell."

The ghosts—referred to in the show as "dreamers"—are a step away from the traditional children’s story that lends the show its name. It is what Dunnagan refers to as "ultimately a ghost story," though whether the dreamers exist outside of 10-year-old orphan Mary’s mind is never entirely certain.

The table’s surface is littered with computer printouts of photographs of the Yorkshire moors, where the story is set, and an impressive, sprawling manor house, circa 1906. And there are books: Fashion of the Early 1900s, The Voice of Fashion, The Gibson Girl and Her America, which Dot Auchmoody, resident costume designer, has been perusing.

One of the biggest challenges, it seems, is how to indicate to the audience which characters onstage are dead and which are alive. Which are in the present, and which exist only as an old, pretty memory? Through color, they decide.

The dreamers will be devoid of it, swathed in a palette of ivory, khaki, dusty peach and beige—reminiscent of a sepia-toned photograph—in light, airy fabrics like silk, lace and chiffon to give the illusion of them floating through Mary’s memory.

"If you’re dead," co-costume designer Mark Vanagas puts its simply, "you’re in light colors, always. Everyone who’s still alive will [wear costumes] much deeper in color, with much more texture, like heavier-weight wool and gabardine." The choice of colors tells an important part of the story, too.

Dunnagan pulls a photograph of a garden guarded by thick, wrought iron gates out of the stack. This, she says, is their key to transitioning smoothly between scenes. By creating 4-foot-wide "wrought iron" panels—carved out of wood in the set design shop, since real iron is cumbersome—they can attach them to sliding tracks and stagger them across the stage to create dimension and, Flynn points out, maintain the constant, liquid movement reminiscent of the ghosts that carry the show on its journey.

Ideas zip around the room, almost visibly passing from one imagination to the next, each time adding more to the mix like a chain letter as it traverses the world. When they break, they’ve made progress, but this is only the beginning.

"We were sweating bullets"

In the same blue room on a different day, 70 hopeful auditioners fill in forms—name, age, when they’ll be available, other shows they’ve performed in—and grin for Polaroids, which are then stapled to their information. Eventually, Rhoda Pugh, the show’s stage manager, will transport the forms, along with the actors they represent, in small groups into the wood-floored audition room next door. There, the performers will sing 16 bars of a song of their choice for a panel about three times more daunting in size than the one on American Idol.

But in the meantime, they wait, dance-shoed feet jiggling, munching the Twizzlers (an apparent Naples Players’ favorite) and popcorn set out for them in the holding room. On the other side of the wall, a question that will determine the fate of the show waits to be answered.

"We were sweating bullets," says Charles Fornara, who is co-music directing and conducting the show, "afraid that we weren’t going to get anybody who could carry the show. When you decide to do a show like The Secret Garden, you know that your success is very much tied to the ability of the little girl."

In groups of five or so, prospective Marys are shooed into the room. Dunnagan calls for volunteers, and a girl of about eight in a green flowered dress bravely steps forward. All apprehension melts away as she launches into The Girl I Mean to Be, a solo that the chosen Mary will ultimately perform onstage.

When she finishes, she looks expectantly at the panel. "Very nicely done," Dunnagan praises.

The next set of auditioners rolls in, and those finished singing move upstairs to learn snippets of dance sequences from choreographer Meg Pryor. With each group that exits, Dunnagan, Fornara, co-music director Julie Shaffer, the assistant director and the co-producers seem almost giddy.

"I want to hear him sing more."

"She’s definitely sassy."

Of a particularly soulful rendition of Somewhere over the Rainbow: "And that is called taking us to church!"

They can breathe a sigh of relief: They have the talent they need. The show will go on. But now the real work must begin.

"This isn’t your fluff

musical"

Ten ghosts form a semi-circle around a piano with Fornara at the bench. On his cue, they sing.

What will put their souls to rest

And stop their ceaseless sighing?

"Give me a little swell after the ‘–ing,’" Fornara says, demonstrating. "‘Siiiigh-ing.’ Fight against the decrescendo. Overdo it. You’re dead, for goodness’ sake."

They try again. Siiiigh-ing.

"That was great," he says. "It was sung with great intensity. I dug it."

It is the first time the dreamers have rehearsed the music together, but Fornara, who also performed in Dunnagan’s first go-around with the show in South Carolina, practically hears it in his sleep. His is the daunting task of reducing the score as it was originally written to only 13 instruments, which means rewriting and reassigning parts to make sure the music still holds the full-orchestra sound it was intended to.

All of the directorial team agrees that this is some of the most difficult music in modern musical theater. "The ending of act one is, for the singers, so enormously sophisticated," Fornara says. "It’s something like 10 different parts. It is probably one of the most difficult things I’ve had to teach in any show."

Which means there is a lot of practice to be done. The women must learn to sing properly when laced into corsets, to waltz in their special rehearsal skirts and shoes. There’s even more to do when you consider that, because of the heavy rehearsal and performance schedules, Dunnagan has double-cast the roles of the children, Mary and Colin, so the adults must run their scenes twice as frequently with two different sets of children, each of whom brings his or her own visions to the personas of the young characters.

"These are four talented little kids," says Mary Anne McKerrow, who is playing Martha, a housemaid in the manor where Mary lives. "If one set brings something new, I get to play off of that the next time when I rehearse it with a different set."