Secrets are rarely thrilling once you discover their contents, and Seattle Children's Theatre's The Secret Garden does little to shield its young audiences from this fact. The first few scenes, pitting obstinate little Mary Lennox (a bracing Sharia Pierce) against the dank, dark, Gothic habit of shutting fears and passions up in closets and cloisters, were wonderfully sinister. The charcoal skeleton of a manor (by Matthew Smucker) looks like a prison for ideas, and the perpendicular, labyrinthine aisles of light indicating hallways (by Rick Paulsen) left little doubt as to the disorienting mechanism of the trap. It's the kind of place where a mysterious lady with musty roses stuffed up her sleeves doesn't look out of place, and the kids around me seemed satisfied with their parents' whispered explanations of her ghostly provenance.

But as much as you might sympathize with the conciliatory efforts of Mary's truth squad, the good cheer she unveils and the secrets she unlocks are bound to disappoint. And sure enough, cheery young Dickon (Hans Altweis)--who admittedly has a lot to live up to, given his repeated advance billing as "the most wonderful boy in the world"--was just plain boring next to David Pichette's Archibald Craven, the scowling hunchback with a bad case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The bird puppets by Douglas N. Paasch are the only redeeming part of this annoyingly happy side of Frances Hodgson Burnett's story. (I only wish the robin's head could have somehow tilted to the side instead of just swiveling back and forth.) The saddest part of the whole production was the miserable little garden, which looked just as funereal cloaked in strings of flowers as it did during the dead of winter. Thank god you only have to look at it for a short while; the end of this adaptation is a mess, but it's over quickly. ANNIE WAGNER

Jesus Christ Superstar
Theatre Babylon
Through Dec 18.

Jesus Christ Superstar is a shrill, humanistic, beautiful, grating musical that either needs to be done really well or not done at all. Some of the score is catchy and sweet and some of it is hellish. The vocals are punishing, particularly for Jesus and Judas. Judas is a uniquely tough role because, in addition to all the high-pitched wailing and low-pitched growling he has to do, his character is more complex than any of the others in the show. Mary Magdalene is a whore who sings pretty songs and Jesus is basically a poof, but Judas has to be cunning, hateful, and sympathetic all at once. In this loose Theatre Babylon production, Judas is played, weirdly enough, by a black woman, Selena Whitaker-Paquiet, and even though she sings some of the second-act songs well and looks suitably crazed, she butchers the opening number, "Heaven on Their Minds," and has none of the necessary masculine chauvinistic rapport with Jesus or his apostles (many of whom are also played by women). Jesus (Brad Cook) looks amazingly like Jesus should, Mary (Maiken Wiese) has a soothing alto voice, and Pontius Pilate (Jerry Lloyd) is scary and convincing. But the show is weak on almost every front: The choreography is half-hearted, the band sounds like they're underwater, and the ensemble is a goofy mess. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

April's Subject
Theater Schmeater
Through Dec 18.

When you package a lot of silly narrative conceits into one late-night bundle, you'd better offer some delirious laugh lines to back them up. April's Subject, Tommy Smith's entry in Theater Schmeater's inaugural Northwest Playwright Competition, contains exactly two such moments. One concerns a picture frame. The second evokes the (patently uproarious) image of a Mormon hermit. Alongside such plot gambits as soap-opera-style amnesia and the revelation of a vast scientific experiment in which a character has been an unwitting participant, the picture frame and hermit are funny, but not quite funny enough.

By the close of the first act, even the most caffeinated actors had started running out of steam. Sarah Papineau, as April the amnesiac, was stubbornly perky and perkily stubborn--and then her character's blinking proto-feminism drooped into fatal abstraction, like a photocopy of a film still from the remake of The Stepford Wives. Lisa Viertel, who also directed the show, was terribly grounded in her role as an accomplice to the grand experiment; it was hard to see why the flighty sycophants surrounding her didn't get sucked down to earth by her gravelly charm.

The rest of the cast was fine, but a little dead. Against the monochrome gray set by Corey Ericksen (note to Mr. Ericksen: I know you were probably working with a limited budget, but couldn't we see some of the mid-century kitsch this script is clearly begging for?), the lovelorn doctor seemed a bit ashen, and the eager intern looked excessively pained. They were missing the vitality necessary to turn this piece of elongated sketch comedy into a reason to stay up late. ANNIE WAGNER