With so many community theatre shows hitting the stage lately, I've been remiss in not talking more about the latest offering from 5th Avenue Theatre.
At a time when such English fare as "Downton Abbey" captivates American audiences, what could be more hip than to take an ivy-filled musical stroll though a 1911 British novel?
The Fifth Avenue Theatre Company takes just such a path as it unravels the mysteries in The Secret Garden, a 1991 Broadway musical that breathed new life into the perennially popular novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett in which a young girl copes with loss and helps heal her extended family by finding and caring for locked garden once tended by her dead aunt who still haunts the manor.
The show will be presented at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 15-16, and a matinee is set for 2 p.m. Sunday, March 17, at the Jean Carlo Stephenson Auditorium at City Hall.
Tickets are $12 for festival seating.
Stepping off stage earlier this week at rehearsal after beautifully belting out the duet song, "Lilly's Eyes," theater veterans and standout singers, Mark Baker and Ron Short, who play the bickering then redemptive brothers, Archibald and Dr. Neville Craven, said the gorgeous music - written by Carly Simon's sister Lucy - drew them into the musical which Baker described as "a singer's show."
Under the musical direction of Eric Akers, the show is powered up with a near dozen-piece orchestra including three keyboardists and three flutists who lend a haunting breath to such songs as "I Heard Someone Crying."
"The music is very haunting as the story is," said director Eddie Harbert. "It's very lilting and the melodies will stick in the audience's head. It's not really a toe-tapping musical but is more a beautiful, sweet kind of music that you will have memories that stay with you."
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