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Broadway Musical Review—Revival of “Once on This Island”
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 13 December 2017 23:02
- Written by Kevin Filipski
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
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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 musicalOnce 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 Flaherty’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
Circle in the Square Theatre, 235 West 50th Street, New York, NY
OnceOnThisIsland.com
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