There’s a moment in Penobscot Youth Theatre’s current production of “The Secret Garden” that is pure magic. It doesn’t involve fancy costumes, lighting, sets or special effects. It is, quite frankly, unspectacular.

Yet when Mary Lennox, the orphaned heroine of the story, sees the secret garden for the first time, our eyes get as big as sunflowers. We’re actually looking at a small stage with a border of sticks and foliage. But she has us looking at a once magnificent garden, now overgrown but nonetheless astounding.

But don’t believe me. Take it on the recommendation of more than 100 first-, second- and third-graders who watched the final dress rehearsal of the show on Wednesday. The kids were generally restless but this moment grabbed them imaginatively and had their otherwise restless bodies in a standstill. They edged up to the ends of their chairs, stretched forward, and saw, with Mary Lennox, a gloriously mysterious place.

“The Secret Garden,” a classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett and adapted here by Sylvia Ashby, tells of Mary Lennox’s journey from India, where her parents both died, to the Yorkshire home of her Uncle Andrew, a depressed man whose wife has tragically died and whose son is psychosomatically ill. Mary starts out spoiled and selfish, but finds the key to more than a secret garden when she begins to develop friendships and move beyond her own needs. In short, she finds the resuscitating power of love.

This production owes much of its theatricality to Jackie Just, who gives real pith to the role of Mary Lennox. A sixth-grader at Pemetic Elementary School in Southwest Harbor, Just is a spitfire of a young performer. Her squeaky voice, loud articulation and onstage at-homeness give this show vitality and personality in a way few other young performers could pull off. She’s refreshingly impertinent, and it works like a charm.

Her biggest victory is bringing life to the ailing Colin Craven, played with appropriate listlessness and rudeness by Padraic A. Harrison. But all the community cast members seem to light up when interacting with Just — although Alison Cox (as Mrs. Medlock), Robert Libby (as Andrew Craven), and Jason Lew (as Dickon) need little coaxing to fill their roles rigorously.

Although Ashby’s adaptation preserves the gentility and grace of Burnett’s writing, and director Sharon Zolper has added many touches that underscore the emotional climate of the themes, you may find yourself wishing the action would move along a bit more crisply. The drawback of this adaptation is the episodic unraveling of the tale, which requires a dizzying number of black-out scene changes for a two-hour show being performed in a tight space. Also, the actors have studiously adopted British accents, which may be admirably authentic but are not always understandable.

“The Secret Garden” will be performed 9:30 a.m., noon and 7 p.m. April 9, 2 and 7 p.m. April 10, and 2 p.m. April 11 at Penobscot Theatre, 183 Main St., Bangor. For tickets, call 942-3333.