Once on This Island Nyc Review General Rush Tickets
Review: 'Once on This Island,' Revived and Ravishing
- Once on This Island
- NYT Critic's Choice
- Broadway, Musical
- one hr. and xxx min.
- Closing Date:
- Circumvolve in the Foursquare, 235 W 50th St.
- 212-239-6200
I wasn't expecting the goat in diapers.
Nor did I arrive at Circle in the Square the other dark anticipating the panorama of village folk barbecuing on the embankment, fishing in the lagoon and going about their daily business in a blithesome preshow panorama on the theater's lozenge-shaped stage.
Had the prove never started, I would accept been quite content.
Simply and so it did, and all I can say is that afterward a dismal theatrical fall, in which even the highlights seemed ashen, what a delight information technology is to enter the world of "Once on This Island." The musical, first seen on Broadway in 1990, opened on Sunday in a ravishing revival directed past Michael Arden.
You may not know that proper name, though if you saw Mr. Arden'south reformulated "Spring Awakening" for Deaf Due west Theater in 2015, y'all'd call back his signature. It's a big signature, maximally decorative and triply underlined.
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That ornateness is perfectly suited to "Once on This Island," a fable of love and death and temperamental gods gear up in the French Antilles. Similar all fables, it is very simple in outline — and thus arguably better suited to literary rather than theatrical expression. Afterwards all, what happens? A girl from one clan falls for a boy from another, the impossibility of their match leading to tragedy and transformation.
Oh look, that's "Romeo and Juliet."
So is this, except that here the boy and girl are named Daniel and Ti Moune. They do not stand for Shakespeare'southward "ii households both alike in dignity" merely rather, as the opening number puts information technology, "two dissimilar worlds on one isle." Daniel is a son of the "grands hommes," with their "pale brown skins" and French means. Ti Moune, a "peasant," is poor and "black as night." The problem of colorism added to class prejudice gives this slim folkloric story as much complexity as it can handle on the page.
But in adapting Rosa Guy'southward novel "My Love, My Dear" to the phase, Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty (music) faced the difficult trouble of deepening our investment in the characters' feelings and conflicts, the mode the poetry in Shakespeare does, without overwhelming their power equally prototypes. The authors' nearly perfect solution is a pastiche Caribbean score whose words are restrained and delicately rhymed but whose music is relentlessly grabby and emotional.
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After in their careers, as Ms. Ahrens and Mr. Flaherty took on large-boned projects like "Ragtime" and "Anastasia," they produced big-boned songs that sometimes struck me as turgid. Simply in this, their first Broadway outing, they were able to continue fifty-fifty the exuberant numbers in calibration, so that a showstopper like "Mama Volition Provide," sung to rattle the roof by the ferocious Alex Newell, doesn't literally stop the show. And the quiet establishing songs for Ti Moune ("Waiting for Life") and Daniel ("Some Girls") do not get lost despite quietly sensitive renderings by Hailey Kilgore and Isaac Powell, making lovely Broadway debuts.
If y'all wondered virtually Mr. Newell'south singing a song called "Mama Will Provide," that'southward surely something that Mr. Arden, the director, intends. "Mama" is one of those temperamental gods, a Female parent Earth effigy called Asaka, and in Mr. Arden's vision, the gods are gender fluid. (Mr. Newell played the transgender character Unique Adams on "Glee.") Likewise the death god, Papa Ge, is played by a woman, Merle Dandridge, rocking a bra. More subtly, the actors, of a variety of skin tones, are non obsessively matched to ane another or to the colors suggested past the script. Lea Salonga, the Filipina Broadway star, plays Erzulie, the goddess of love; the heroic-voiced Quentin Earl Darrington, as the water god Agwe, is blue.
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And guess what? It makes no divergence.
Or, rather, it does, by exemplifying the ludicrousness of such distinctions and underlining the show's bid to be seen equally a universal story that every civilisation enacts and anyone can tell. (8 performers, called storytellers, have been added to the cast of this revival.) If Mr. Arden's casting choices also take some of the pressure off possible questions of cultural appropriation — he and the prove's authors are white — and then exist it; the larger bespeak is worth making right at present.
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Merely just if information technology'southward made well, and Mr. Arden'southward staging serves his peak-to-bottom terrific bandage of black and Hispanic and Asian actors beautifully. In fleshing out the world of the story and annotating every corner of the audition's experience — hello, goat! — Mr. Arden gives the performers the kind of properties that both grounds them and provides dissimilarity for their big, bold emotions. He has besides aced every theatrical trick he's torn from the aboriginal handbook, freshening the show, and the tricks, in the process.
I stopped jotting down those tricks at a sure point, peradventure afterward a fan representing a storm gale blew my notebook'south pages about. Still, I recall that they included Ti Moune'south split-second metamorphosis from child to young adult female, the car accident that lands Daniel in Ti Moune'southward care, a shadow play relating the isle'southward history of form enmity, a secret switch of a sleeping body, a journey, a expiry, a inundation and a firefly.
Other effects are incremental: The gods, who brainstorm, like everyone else in the prove, as workaday members of the island customs, simply slowly take on their lordly bear on and spectacular regalia. (Asaka's tablecloth brim and a trash tiara for Erzulie are among the many small delights of Clint Ramos's ofttimes hilarious costume design.) Other furnishings are environmental, including the scenic blueprint, a dense bricolage of institute objects by Dane Laffrey that keeps revealing new surprises. At a certain point yous may retrieve you've spotted them all, but have you looked under the sand?
The hallmark ingenuity, warmth and intensity bordering on backlog that characterize Mr. Arden'south style is recapitulated everywhere within the production, from the bluntly stupendous singing (Chris Fenwick is the music supervisor) to the electrical choreography of Camille A. Brown. Everyone is working on the same crammed folio.
If all this is v per centum too Technicolor, five pct too illustrative, I'd rather accept that than a production that is v percent too dour. "Once on This Island" is, after all, a sad story already, and Mr. Arden hasn't fiddled with that. (The text is barely changed.) Then if Ti Moune'southward tragedy must end, like and so many fables, in another phenomenon transformation, in our nighttime season, permit information technology be a gorgeous ane.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/theater/review-once-on-this-island-revived-and-ravishing.html
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