Australian author Joan Lindsay has credited a dream as the inspiration for her beloved 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock — a story centered around the disappearance of a teacher and three students at all-girls boarding school in a remote section of Australia in 1900. A shadowy stream-of-consciousness looms over Peter Weir’s 1975 film adaptation, which is full of atmosphere and lush images that enhance the sense of mystery. Now writer/lyricist Hilary Bell and composer/arrranger Greta Gertler Gold have adapted Picnic at Hanging Rock as a chamber musical that is as appealing and elusive as the fates of the girls who go missing on a Valentine’s Day excursion to a nearby geologic monolith that’s sacred ground for aboriginal people who have been moved away from their land.
Bell leans into some of this dark colonialist history, making one of the two male characters a First Nations tracker (Bradley Lewis) who accompanies Michael (Reese Sebastian Diaz), an earnest young British gentleman exploring his family’s Australian land holdings for the first time and quickly becoming enamored with one of the young female students. That student, Miranda (Gillian Han, bright-eyed and clear voiced) opens and closes the show with lovely ballads about keeping yourself open to the possibilities that life has to offer in our fleeting time on Earth — a central theme of the show that’s thrown into sharp focus by the petty squabbling among some of the girls and the stiff-backed stubbornness of the headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard (Erin Davie), who seems frustrated when the news of the disappearance threatens her school and her whole life’s work.
Gertler Gold’s score — performed by a five-piece band that includes a piano, percussion, violin, cello, and bass guitar under conductor Anessa Marie Scolpini — carries echoes of Jason Robert Brown, Sondheim, and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening but ultimately seems to owe less to musical theater traditions than to the operatic, story-driven pop songs of ’70s artists like Kate Bush.
The storytelling can be herky-jerky and hard to follow in places for those unfamiliar with the material, and the songs seldom do much to advance the plot (and sometimes end abruptly or anticlimactically). Also, we meet a lot of girls — too many to keep track of, though they do blend beautifully in group choral numbers. A few do stand out: Miranda, a leader of the senior girls; Sara (Sarah Walsh), the younger orphan whom Miranda takes under her wing and perhaps, it’s hinted, into a furtive romantic relationship; Marion (Kate Louissant), the class know-it-all who realizes all too well that she’s less likely to become a judge as she hope than a judge’s wife; and Irma (Tatianna Córdoba), the flirtatious heiress who’s rescued by the two men several days into a very public search but seems as reluctant as Michael to seal their chance encounter with a betrothal of societal equals.
There is much craft on display in director Portia Krieger’s production, which makes heroic efforts to open up the cramped stage of the Greenwich House Theater with Daniel Zimmerman’s simple but evocative set, but there’s oddly not much passion. Critics and academics have pored over Picnic for its pioneering homoeroticism (both in the book and the movie) but the musical curiously chooses not to foreground those aspects of the story despite the Valentine’s Day setting and the depiction of the missing teacher, Miss McCraw (Kaye Tuckerman), as a butch math-lover admired for what the headmistress calls her “masculine intelligence.” (In both the book and the movie, Michael and his native Aussie companion effectively walk off into the sunset together.)
Instead, Bell and Gertler Gold prefer to focus on sublimated desires and feelings that never quite bubble all the way to the surface of either consciousness or action — even the suggestion that the girls might have been sexually assaulted is shushed down almost quickly as the idea is raised. It’s all very prim and proper and vaguely mysterious. The picnickers endure a series of bizarre experiences — stopped watches, lost time, sudden sleepiness, the desire to venture deeper into unknown crevices of the Rock — that ultimately seal their fate. I wish that Krieger had pushed her design team, including lighting designer Barbara Samuels and sound designer Nick Kourtides, to find more theatrical ways to represent the otherworldly or hallucinogenic encounters of the girls who go missing and the strange allure that Hanging Rock seems to have over those in its presence.
Like the clutch of girls cooing over their Valentine gifts to each other, Picnic is alive with promise and possibility. It captures an atmosphere of potential as well as foreboding with real skill. And there’s something energizing about so many female artists creating (or re-creating) what is fundamentally a women’s story that underscores their status and predicament in turn-of-the-20th-century society. It’s telling that the main takeaway may be how, for women whose lives were so circumscribed by institutional prejudice, the supernatural may have offered an actual means of escape. One of the only ways to rebel against the rigid expectations of marriage or schoolteachering, the girls in Picnic suggest, is to vanish altogether. ★★★☆☆
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
Greenwich House Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through January 17 for $56 to $136
Culture Sauce 