The Secret Garden is a complex piece of musical theatre with overlapping themes of love, loss, regret and secrets coming to light. It is a world filled with memories, ghosts, and movement from light into darkness and into light.
Visually our production was built around a scenic idea. Rolling wall sections which could be maneuvered by the actors would be used to form the many different scenic locations required. Additionally the choreography of actors, walls, and light would create a "wall ballet" at the end of act I. In this sequence Mary is led through the garden maze during a storm to discover the door to the secret garden.
The central image for my lighting design grew out of the relationship of the world of the ghosts characters to the world of the "real" characters. The chorus of ghosts characters serves as a theatrical metaphor for the living character’s memories and as a device for tying the worlds of India, Misselthwaite Manor, and the garden together. It was important to the director and I to be able to clearly separate the ghosts visually at times, and at other times to let them mix.
My initial response to the world of the ghost was a vibrant world filled with pink and lavender hues. This worked especially well with the ghost costumes (borrowed from the Broadway production) which were all in versions of white. My choice was very different from the original design in which the true colors of the costumes were generally maintained. I additionally conceived of the heavy use of sidelight to further separate the lighting of the ghosts from that of the other characters and scenes.
With numbers such as I Heard Someone Crying the strong pink light of the ghost Lily would be allowed to fill the space of the stage as her memory fills the scene. At other points in the production, such as in the exterior garden scenes, the ghost characters were to simply be observers. They did not directly interact with the scene and were to be only a visual presence. These scenes would generally be without the heavy use of color.
The Opening/Dream sequence at the beginning of the show and the storm sequence at the end of act I represented the most complex scenes. Here the real characters seem to enter the ghostly supernatural world as they are led to their fates. These would be complex cue sequences built out of many dark richly patterned stage images. Light would be choreographed with the movement of actors and scenic pieces in the space.
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