Picnic at Hanging Rock 

Picnic at Hanging Rock 

Based on the book by Joan Lindsay 

Book & Lyrics by Hilary Bell 

Music & Arrangements by Greta Gertler Gold 

Directed by Portia Krieger 

Greenwich House Theatre, New York 

January 17, 2026 

Reviewed by Bess Rowen 

When I think of the 1975 Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock, it conjures images of beautifully rich natural landscapes filled with ethereal teenage girls in ankle-length white dresses. My main question about a theatrical version of this story was about what the titular natural rock formation would look like in an intimate space like the Greenwich House Theatre. But this new musical adaptation, directed by Portia Krieger, shifted the focus from the landscape surrounding the Australian schoolgirls to the girls themselves, which made the material fresh while still paying homage to the first globally successful Australian film. It follows the story of three popular and promising teenage girls and a teacher who vanish from a group picnic at Hanging Rock that arranged by their boarding school. Were they abducted? Did they run away? Or did something unexplainable occur?  

Although the film is the most famous adaptation of this story, Joan Lindsay’s 1967 book of the same name has inspired music, dance, and theatre pieces for decades. Both the book and the film focus on a private boarding school in Australia during the last year before Australia’s independence from England. The Headmistress is strict, and the high school girls are both studious and romantic. Instead of featuring a stereotypically mean popular girl, at the top of the school’s social ladder is Miranda, who is beautiful, smart, and kind beyond belief. She befriends a new student, Sara, an orphan whose adoptive family sent her away to boarding school. Sara is smitten with Miranda, as is everyone else, but Miranda tells Sara that she needs to try to love other people because Miranda will not be around for long. Miranda’s sureness is tinged with sadness, but her words (of course) prove prescient. When all of the girls except for Sara are treated to a picnic at the beautiful and dangerous vistas of Hanging Rock, Miranda, Irma, Marion, and Edith want to walk up to the base of the rock formation. Edith, who stopped to rest as the other girls continued to walk, returns to the picnic site, screaming and unable to say what she saw. She can only remember passing her teacher, Miss McCraw, walking up the rock as she ran down. The other girls and Miss McCraw do not return. In the following days, a rich eligible bachelor, Michael, and his male chaperone, Albert, feel a strong pull to go look for the girls. After Michael collapses, Irma, is also unable to say what has happened. As the days stretch out without new information, tensions build at the boarding school. Eventually, Sara dies by suicide while waiting for Miranda, and the strict headmistress dies at the base of Hanging Rock, ostensibly after falling while trying to climb. The audience is left with the sense that the mystery of what happened to the missing girls and teacher will never be satisfactorily solved. 

The first notable choice in this stage adaptation is to make the story a musical with catchy songs and memorable lyrics from Hilary Bell and Greta Gertler Gold, which literally gives voice to the schoolgirls from the start and establishes this Picnic at Hanging Rock as their story. While the film is about the event of the disappearance, this musical version is about how this event impacted the schoolgirls. There is very little dialogue in the film, meaning that the striking images and vaguely unsettling soundtrack tell most of the story. But having Miranda, Sarah, and the other girls speak and sing immediately shifts the piece from a vaguely allegorical tale to a meditation on the pressures felt by teenage girls stuck between Victorian societal expectations and the boundless energy they long to express. When the girls first appear on stage, in costumes mirroring the silhouettes of those in the film, they immediately called to mind some other important plays about teenage girls in school environments, such as Christa Winsloe’s Girls in Uniform (which also has film versions, both called Mädchen in Uniform) and even Frank Wedekind/Duncan Shiek’s Spring Awakening. Those plays focus on the way regimented environments put additional pressure on those students who do not conform to the norms. But this adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock homes in on the individual stories of the characters and their interpersonal relationships as opposed to whatever mysterious larger forces might be at play in the disappearance. It particularly leans into celebrating the communal ties that mostly revolve around Miranda. Even after they vanish, Miranda, Irma, and Marion appear on stage and in the house, both frightening and comforting the rest of the characters. Their positions within the social fabric of the school community are more important here than their disappearances. 

This piece featured strong ensemble work overall, but the actors playing the three girls who vanish were able to capture the larger-than-life qualities of these idealized high school seniors with performances that struck a balance of charm, intelligence, and drive. This production also diversified the many blonde and blue-eyed white characters from the original by adding an important aspect of indigeneity to the plot. Portraying Sara and her estranged brother Albert as indigenous put the school’s harsh treatment of Sara in racist and colonialist terms, while Albert is explained to be an indigenous tracker conscripted to work who respects the sacred importance of Hanging Rock. This change highlighted an important aspect of the political context of 1900 Australia (and one easily relevant to the United States today). It therefore makes sense that he is the one who rescues Michael and then Irma, whose lack of respect for the land they tread on is part of what causes them trouble. Gillian Jackson Han’s Miranda had a genuine kindness and free spirit while showing hints of Miranda’s awareness of her impending absence. Tatianna Córdoba’s Irma was delightfully bubbly and bouncy in a way that still managed to sell the ridiculously large bow in her hair. Her earnestness made the scenes where people lash out at her (because she is the only girl to return) particularly difficult to watch. And, finally, Kate Louissaint’s Marion was a delightful nerd whose role was the most expanded of the core girls. She has almost no lines in the film, but here it is Louissant’s Marion who explains the history of Hanging Rock and who dreams of continuing her education while knowing that her fate will be to marry instead.  

Rounding out the main characters is Sarah Walsh’s Sara, who is the outsider now left without Miranda’s protection. Sara’s love for Miranda is implied to be romantic in the film, but this adaptation makes that far clearer, and perhaps more mutual. Her queerness further explains her feelings of isolation and difference from the rest of girls. Walsh’s portrayal of the awkward outcast gave the audience the clearest sense of Miranda’s kind nature, and Sara becomes the audience stand-in as she tries to put together what happened. Sara also sees Miranda’s ghost throughout the second act, which is a nice departure from the film, where it is often the male characters who believe they have caught a glimpse of her. As this account has shown, I was far more riveted by the many scenes from the girls’ perspectives than I was by any of the interactions with the two men. This is not a comment on the strength of Bradley Lewis’s performance as Albert or Reese Sebastian Diaz’s Michael, but was a result of how compellingly the musical’s focus on the girls foregrounded their stories. 

Although the performances were what stood out about Picnic at Hanging Rock, I must conclude by applauding the musical’s design, which abstracted the stunning landscapes and buildings in the film to further spotlight the stories of the characters. Daniel Zimmerman’s set captured the feeling of an inspiring but also vaguely menacing landscape and the regimented order of a Victorian school. And Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s costumes were stunning, evoking the uniformity of the originals while expanding the color-palette of the play into a dynamic display of character. Barbara Samuels’s lighting design coupled with the dynamic set to make a small stage contain multitudes. And Nick Kourtides’s sound design evoked the wilderness just outside the school walls. Finally, Mayte Natalio’s choreography enabled the characters to truly express the inner turmoil that bubbles under the surface in the film version. The choreography was a standout aspect of this production, and Krieger’s direction incorporated it seamlessly into the overall flow of the story. 

I hope that this short run of Picnic at Hanging Rock at the Greenwich House Theatre paves the way for more opportunities to produce this musical elsewhere. Its messages about the power and resistance of teenage girls is right at home in a world where the success of John Proctor is the Villain and musicals like Six ask us to reconsider our previous assumptions about how teenage girls show up on American stages. It also reminds us that the most important stories in any mystery are those of the victims, whose stories should not be limited to the events surrounding their disappearances or deaths. Despite being a work of fiction, this victim-centered version of Picnic at Hanging Rock shows that what was lost when these girls climbed Hanging Rock was not just a series of pretty faces, but rich futures that might have changed the world.