Welcome! Check out our Wiki page for help with how to get started!ġ. "That's a pretty cool way to end my time here.Are you looking for a name for your baby? Your character? Your business? Yourself? Are you fascinated by the history and meaning of names? /r/namenerds is a community for name enthusiasts of all kinds. We get the chance to define these characters and make this show our own," Pierce said. "It's the first time this piece will ever be performed. She's been in shows throughout the pandemic and said she's glad one of her last shows gets to be performed in-person and that it's an original piece. You get to decide what you do."Īs the only senior in the show, for Jadyn Pierce, the show is a bittersweet cap on her acting career at Hermantown. You can try things and see how they work. It doesn’t really matter, you can do whatever. "But as a puppet, it’s almost like improv. "When you’re a set character, you have lines you deliver, otherwise you'll mess other people up," said Alee DeVlieger, a student playing Nibble the rabbit. Students dressed in black act out the furry animals such as rabbits, squirrels, foxes, crows and robins. Mary gets some help changing from a cast of friendly woodland creatures, in this show represented by puppets and puppeteers. "It's about not letting grief consume you." "We see Mary and Colin go through some major transformations, as well as Archibald," Hewitt said.
Hewitt said what she wants people to most take away from this show is the idea of transformation. "I can kind of get that as we were locked up with quarantine back at the start of this pandemic." Then she learns to be nice and get along with people and have friends and be a normal kid after being locked up in a room for a long time," Hewitt said. "At the beginning, she’s very stuck up and stubborn. Along the way, the characters discover more about themselves and how to grow through grief.įor Elyana Hewitt, playing Mary Lennox has been a fun challenge. She finds it and brings it back to life with the help of Mary's brother Dickon and her sickly cousin Colin. The secret garden is locked away after her death, but awakens Mary's curiosity. Craven has been in a state of inconsolable grief since the death of his wife, who had cultivated a garden. The story follows a young girl named Mary Lennox, a bratty little girl who lost her parents to cholera and is sent to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven.
Lilias’ death and Archibald’s reaction helps form the background of the play. We wanted to be faithful to this book and do our best to truly bring it to life."Īrchibald Craven (Trenton Paasch) and Lilias Craven (Jadyn Pierce) appear in the Hermantown High School production of “The Secret Garden” during rehearsal Wednesday, Nov. "Even in the program, we have the scenes listed as chapters instead of act one and act two. "Every word in the script is from the book," Taraldsen said. Ahlberg and Taraldsen hadn't written their own musical before, so they leaned heavily on pulling as much from the book as possible.
The book is in the public domain so it is free to adapt. In the midst of everything, the directors decided they had a clear choice - write their own musical. "There was a Broadway adaptation of it which had beautiful music, but they changed the story so drastically that it was almost unrecognizable to me." "I've always loved the book and it has a family connection for me," Ahlberg said. Last year, in between teaching a mix of hybrid classes and finding ways to stage shows without jeopardizing their students' health, Hermantown High School theater directors Ken Ahlberg and Theresa Taraldsen decided their fall 2021 show would be "The Secret Garden." But they couldn't find a version of it that they liked.