On a gold-tinged morning at Appleyard College, a senior named Miranda wakes singing a foreboding melody. Her heartbeat is hammering, and she’s caught somewhere “between lost and free.”
There’s perhaps no better metaphor to encapsulate “Picnic at Hanging Rock: The Musical,” a psychedelic show based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel. That stalled state in between reverie and reality is where the story places young Miranda, and where the production ultimately remains for its two acts.
Some of that confusion is inherent to the source material. Lindsay’s book, later adapted into a film by Peter Weir, is notorious for its ambiguous ending. On Feb. 14, 1900, three seniors attending an English manners school in Australia — the thoughtful Miranda (Gillian Jackson Han in the musical), the affluent Irma (Tatianna Córdoba) and the brainy Marion (Kate Louissaint) — vanish during an outing to the awe-inspiring Hanging Rock, along with their mathematics teacher, Miss McCraw (Kaye Tuckerman). Irma is eventually found unconscious in a hollow of the jagged terrain, and when she wakes, she recalls nothing. The others are never found, and the rock’s dangers, whether mythological or human, remain a mystery.
Hilary Bell’s book and lyrics for the musical find a promising middle ground between the novel’s lush imagery and the film’s hypnopompic, poetic cadences. Still, something’s awry. The first act traverses time and location, which proves challenging for the director, Portia Krieger, to chart on the cramped stage at Greenwich House Theater, where the show opened on Thursday.
Crucial story beats — like Irma’s discovery or the cruel treatment of a salient younger woman named Sara (Sarah Walsh), who worshiped Miranda — are lost to awkward staging. Characters wander and return, speak in verse and prose, drift in and out of slumber; capturing that fantasia is difficult, even with hefty assistance from the lighting designer Barbara Samuels’s ghostly glows and the sound designer Nick Kourtides’s spooky echoes. These elements successfully communicate an uncanny tone, but you feel “Hanging Rock” yearn for some sort of directorial architecture, a logic that tracks if we’re witnessing a memory, fantasy or reality.
There are some things to savor at this picnic. Bell, who is Australian, brings a thoughtful awareness of her nation’s colonial past, introducing the Indigenous name of hanging rock, Ngannelong, through an Aboriginal character who reveres its spiritual might. In fact, multiple characters feel called to protect the natural world or advance the scientific study of it — two pursuits that seem under threat in the United States today.
Bell’s choice to flesh out the juniors, amplifying their anxieties and speculations, also gives the younger characters more voice. Their kinship found in collective suffering reads as more relatable, and their emotions — rage, hurt, confusion — seem all the more alive. That expressiveness carries over into movement as the choreographer, Mayte Natalio, instructs the actors to stomp through dance numbers, jump on and offstage, wave their arms in wild, lyrical patterns. It lends the girls a feral physicality, reinforced by Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s costumes, particularly, in the first act when she abandons the familiar, flat color palette of ivory corsets and dresses that Weir used in favor of naturalized violets, greens, cabernets, which tether the girls to their landscape.
Even without resolution, Krieger’s interpretation of “Hanging Rock” is clear: This is a parable of young female desire. Marion wants knowledge, Miranda wants transcendence, Sara wants family, and all these girls are open about what they crave. In the number “Doomed,” the senior girls lead a song comparing their prescribed futures to a curse, singing ruefully about becoming “respectable wives.” Articulating that they want more makes their disappearance all the more heartbreaking.
Ambition is expressed through song, but the frustrating thing about “Hanging Rock” is that everything else is, too. There seems to be a distrust of spoken dialogue and silence to carry emotional meaning. Greta Gertler Gold’s bloated score is hardly aggressive, falling in line with a modern wave of pop-folk with a few rock flourishes, but it’s stuffed with overly explanatory songs. (It doesn’t help that Bell’s lyrics are relentlessly metaphorical; at one point a character sings, “the rock must have a heart of stone.”)
While it makes sense for these creators to go big (the story is concerned with millions-of-years-old earthen enigmas, after all), “Picnic at Hanging Rock” struggles to move us through its points of action with enough nuance. Its bevy of female roles still make it an exciting accomplishment, one that seems destined to live on in future productions or school stages. But in the show’s effort to tell a vast mystery, it forgets the importance of clarity.
Picnic at Hanging Rock Through Jan. 17 at the Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; picnicthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
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