By Marsha Norman. Music by Lucy Simon. Based on the book by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Directed by David Adams. A Gateway Theatre production.

At the Gateway Theatre until January 2

The musical version of The Secret Garden is about kids but it's not for kids. In this odd piece of theatre, Marsha Norman gives a darkly moody and unnecessarily psychoanalytic treatment to an innocently affecting children's novel.

As both the book and the musical make clear, the abandoned garden, with its potential for renewal, is a metaphor for the grieving heart. A little girl named Mary is orphaned when her parents die of cholera in India. She is sent to live with Archibald Craven, her bitter, hunchbacked uncle, in spooky Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors. Traumatized and apparently haughty, she begins to soften when she meets a local boy named Dickon, who converses with animals.

But Mary is still disturbed. She hears crying in the manor house and eventually discovers its source. In a Jane Eyre --like twist, Craven has locked his invalid son away in one of the rooms. Colin Craven's mother, Lily, died giving birth to him; Archibald's unresolved grief has resulted in destructive denial.

Lily left behind a garden, though, and that's where the healing comes from. The walled sanctuary has been locked, but Mary finds the key, and with a robin's help she locates the ivy-covered door. Mary finds her happiness as the three children bring life back to the plants and Colin regains his health.

The suspense-filled searches for the boy and the garden, and their ensuing resurrections, are the main events in Burnett's novel. In Norman's telling, those core narrative elements get short shrift. Colin is quickly discovered, and his healing is perfunctory. Similarly, the garden is easily accessed, and we don't see any of the work that goes into reviving it.

Norman has no time for the mundane mysteries of plot; she much prefers the murkier workings of the human psyche. Rather than concentrating on the incremental, rejuvenating power of nature, she focuses on static grief. Norman's version crowds the stage with the undead, not just Lily, but Mary's mother and father and everybody they knew on the subcontinent.

Norman spends far too much time exploring motivations that are, at most, deftly hinted at in the book, including Dr. Neville Craven's libidinous desire for his brother's wife. Rather than advancing the story, Norman's approach repeats explanations of its dynamics. Instead of showing us Dickon actively engaging with animals, Norman has him sing about spring; Dickon's pagan vitality becomes a concept rather than something to be directly experienced and shared.

So I don't much like the material, but in many ways, this production is admirable. With his jubilant tenor and saucy presence, Jeremy Crittenden is magnetic as Dickon. John Payne is gruffly charming--and in equally fine voice--as Ben, the old gardener. These two actors also sport accurate Yorkshire accents, unlike Alison MacDonald, who plays Dickon's sister, Martha, a young serving woman. A girl named Natalia Sudeyko makes a credible and wittily petulant Colin, and Ashley Macdonald sings very well and delivers a workable acting performance as Mary. Evelyn Thatcher plays Lily, and in a cast that features many strong voices, her liquid soprano stands out.

In Phillip Tidd's handsome set, the dead white marble of Misselthwaite is shot through with the promise of green. But the set's transformation, in which characters attach fake flowers to a few surfaces, is underwhelming.

Shane Droucker's vividly expressionist lighting makes a good match with Norman's associative script, but it's so mechanized and busy that many times the sense it conjures feels closer to a disco than a moor.

This Gateway production serves the terms of the musical, but I find those terms alienating.