Coeur d’Alene Summer Theatre’s ‘The Secret Garden’ aims to balance fine line between classic story, fresh take

It can be difficult to produce a musical as beloved as “The Secret Garden.” On one hand, you want to stick to the story audiences know and love. It’s a classic for a reason, after all. But on the other hand, you don’t want to copy and paste a previous production, denying yourself the opportunity to add a personal touch to the story.

Antoinette DiPietropolo, director of the Coeur d’Alene Summer Theatre’s production of “The Secret Garden,” is aware of that fine line and has managed to put her fresh take on the classic story while still keeping the beloved elements intact.

“I definitely have a heart and a tempo that would shift the show in a manner that has breathed new life into it,” she said. “That’s what’s nice about my version of the show is it has a different take on it.”

“The Secret Garden” opens Friday, July 19, at North Idaho College’s Schuler Performing Arts Center and runs through July 28. There will be an ASL interpreter at the July 21 performance.

“The Secret Garden” features music by Lucy Simon and a book and lyrics by Marsha Norman. The musical is based on the 1911 novel of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The musical follows 10-year-old Mary Lennox (Magnolia Burke), who was born and raised in India, but is sent to live with her uncle Archibald Craven (Joel Cummings) in Misselthwaite Manor in England after her parents Rose Lennox (Dawn Simmons) and Captain Albert Lennox (Robert McPherson) succumb to cholera.

Craven, still heartbroken after the death of his wife Lily (Jenny Shotwell), leaves much of the manor’s management to his brother, Dr. Neville Craven (John Adkinson). Though she at first hates her time at Misselthwaite, Lennox soon learns about the existence of a walled garden from a chambermaid named Martha (Jaci Cummings) and that her cousin Colin Craven (Clark Shotwell) lives at Misselthwaite, confined to bed since birth.

With the help of the gardener Ben Weatherstaff (Roger Welch) and Martha’s brother Dickon (David Eldridge), Lennox begins to breathe new life into the garden, helping herself, Colin and Archibald to bloom in the process.

“The Secret Garden” is music directed by Matt Goodrich and stage managed by Autumn Dancy.

DiPietropolo has worked with the Coeur d’Alene Summer Theatre twice before, on productions of “Pride and Prejudice” and “Mamma Mia!” When it came to “The Secret Garden,” she knew she wanted to dig deeper into the text, finding the whys within the script so the story didn’t rely solely on face value.

“What did the people that are dead in the show, the Dreamers, actually represent?” she said. “I’m making them a little more alive and driving the story so they can learn their lesson to really move through to the next life. That is really represented in the story much more than usual.”

Another “Antoinette take” involves the garden itself. In the story of “The Secret Garden” gardener Ben hurts his back two years before Mary’s arrival and is only able to tend to potted plants in his greenhouse. Mary and Dickon then take those potted plants to the garden, which had been locked since Lily’s death, giving it a humble start before its rejuvenation at the hands of Mary, Dickon and Ben.

“Ben is really the person that has been curating this for two years … Even though we add more into the garden, we sort of add the element of Ben to say this person actually did help keep it alive,” DiPietropolo said. “Sometimes you have to replant and you have to redo and sometimes you don’t know that those two years of work in his little greenhouse really paid off for this moment as well.”

Another fun element is that Colin and Jenny are played by an actual mother and son, Clark and Jenny Shotwell.

Jenny Shotwell performed in the Seattle-Tacoma area for 15 years before she and her family relocated to Coeur d’Alene four years ago. Shotwell played Maria in the Coeur d’Alene Summer Theatre’s production of “The Sound of Music” last summer and has performed in the Ellen Travolta Christmas Cabaret at the Coeur d’Alene Resort the last three years.

Shotwell said she has been obsessed with “The Secret Garden” since she was 13 years old. She calls Lily a role she’s always wanted to play and “How Could I Ever Know?” – a song she sings with Cummings in the second act – one of the most beautiful love songs that’s ever been written for musical theater.

Though Clark joined Shotwell in her own cabaret in 2022 and during the Ellen Travolta Christmas Cabaret last year, performing with Shotwell and also playing piano and singing on his own, “The Secret Garden” marks their first musical theater production together.

Shotwell teaches voice and piano and said there is always music in the home, so while working with her son was a little different than working with other students, Shotwell wasn’t concerned about Clark as a performer.

“I’ve always felt that Clark’s an old soul and I know that I’m his mom, so I’m biased but he’s very musically well beyond his years,” she said. “I know how smart he is. I know how determined he is. I also know how music is so deeply ingrained in him.”

It has been difficult at times for Shotwell to portray the mother-son relationship with Clark when Lily is longing for time with Colin. She said she’s gotten choked up a few times during rehearsals but is working on allowing those emotions to help her give a moving performance and honor the story and music of “The Secret Garden.”

Keeping with DiPietropolo’s plan for the Dreamers, Lily’s story is more prominent in the musical than the book, and Shotwell is happy audiences get to see the character in an elevated role.

“She really is orchestrating the whole redemption side of the story …” she said. “Lily is moving Mary through this new world in an effort to get Archie to recognize that he has a child and to love that child. A lot of the things that Lily is doing, and especially in those moments with Colin, is trying with such powerful love and beautiful music to pull all of these worlds back together for, ultimately, a really beautiful story about what love can do to bring people together and to heal wounds that have happened.”

It’s that redemptive quality that Shotwell thinks brings people back to “The Secret Garden” time and time again.

“The concept of redemption is such a powerful story,” she said. “This story has love being the guiding force behind three different stories that are individually tied – Mary’s story, Archibald’s story and Colin’s story – and how their common love for family, for Lily and for this garden is bringing them together and ultimately allowing their lives to continue in a really positive way.”