Once on This Island
Book & lyrics by Lynn Ahrens; music
by Stephen Flaherty
Choreographed by Camille A. Brown; directed
by Michael Arden
Opened December 3, 2017
Circle in the Square Theatre, 235 West
50th Street, New York, NY
OnceOnThisIsland.com
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| Hailey Kilgore in Once on This Island (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Set on
an unnamed Haiti, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s musical Once
on an Island premiered in 1990, its initial run introducing LaChanze to
New York. For the show’s first Broadway revival—a cleverly-conceived production
in the round, complete with sand, rain and a pond—there’s another impressive actress
making her debut: Oregon teenager Hailey Kilgore.
Kilgore
is Ti Moune, orphaned in a raging storm as a youngster and taken in by the
loving Mama Euralie and Tonton Julian on an isle bitterly divided between dark-skinned
natives and lighter-skinned French descendants, the grand hommes. One day, Ti Moune sees a car crash involving Daniel,
teenage grand homme; she nurses him
back to health, begging the local gods—Papa Ge, Asaka, Agwe, Erzulie—to take
her rather than him, imaging that he has fallen for her as she has him, despite
sundry obstacles: his family, his fiancée and their class differences, for
starters.
This beguiling
fable has a homespun wisdom that’s greater than the sum of its parts, as Ahrens’s merely serviceable book and lyrics are married to Flaherty’s tuneful
but derivative songs. The folk tale’s plot—filled as it is with unabashed
sentiment, teenage romance and a celebration of the circle of life, so to speak—alternates
between cloyingly and happily beneficent.
Michael
Arden’s inventive staging begins before the musical proper: bare-footed actors
mill around the sandbox set, mingling with audience members near the stage as
they go about their everyday business like feeding the animals. Camille A. Brown's resourceful choreography allows spacious movement within the relatively cramped space of Dane Laffrey’s spry
set, which seems to sprout new expanses wherever one looks (a trailer truck, a fallen
telephone pole, even parts of theater seats are brought into delightfully
ramshackle service). Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer’s ingenious lighting and Clint
Ramos’s canny costumes complete the fully-formed world we are willingly whisked
into for 90 mostly blissful minutes.
There’s
commanding vocal work from Phillip Boykin as Tonton Julian and Kenita R. Miller
as Mama Euralie, and Isaac Powell’s poised Daniel and Kilgore’s enchanting Ti
Moune make a charming pair of not-quite lovers. Best of all, the gods comprise
a quartet of ultra-talented belters: Merle Dandridge, Quentin Earl Darrington,
Alex Newell and the always winning Lea Salonga, whose clear-as-crystal soprano
rings out even amid so many astonishingly strong voices on this island.
Once on This Island
Opened December 3, 2017
Circle in the Square Theatre, 235 West
50th Street, New York, NY
OnceOnThisIsland.com
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