By Tony Phillips**** “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Kanye West told approximately 8.5 million viewers tuned into a Red Cross fundraiser just days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Three months after that, Beyonce, in a flame-tipped dress, turned Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” into an indictment, as a tuxedoed President Bush stood looking on at that year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
On New York City stages, enough Katrina-based work poured forth that The K Word authors were able to collect their play in a volume called Katrina Onstage: Five Plays. Uptown, the Classical Theatre of Harlem shanghai-ed Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon atop a tar-paper roof surrounded by waist deep water the actors wade through to make their entrances and exits before bringing their Waiting for Godot to the Ninth Ward for free performances, while James Lecesne lead a group of high school students in a benefit performance of Once on This Island over in the Third Ward.
“It would seem no place or person,” director Michael Arden wrote, “is immune to the power and wrath of the gods.”
His program note for the recent Broadway revival of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1990 Caribbean-flavored musical fable, Once on This Island, also name-checks Haiti, Katrina, Syria, 9/11 and the tracks of hurricanes Irma and Maria. No play, it would seem, is immune, either. Someone ought to tip off the current administration, not to mention Kanye.
Once on This Island begins in good, environmental fashion the moment one steps into the Circle in the Square auditorium. In fact, a member of my party knocked a pair of flip-flops off a tight-squeeze theatre wall spiked with various other wardrobe items seemingly hung out to dry. This before we even found our seats and settled in to the spectacle of an upturned shipwreck, tons of sand and live livestock.
Indeed, the cast member I was most excited to see—Glee’s Alex Newell—was mere feet away from our section, dancing barefoot in the sand and cooking up something delicious on an improvised grill. He’s tackling the role of Mother Earth, traditionally cast female, most memorably when Lillias White joined the second cast of the Broadway premiere.
Newell does not disappoint, raising the splintered roof with Asaka’s signature “Mama Will Provide” number. And there are no shortage of deities joining him onstage—from Lea Salonga’s Goddess of Love to Merle Dandridge—also cast against gender—as fearsome death himself: Papa Ge. But as the source material suggests, the show really belongs to the titular heroine of Trinidadian Rosa Guy’s 1985 novel, The Peasant Girl, or the dark-skinned orphan Ti Moune. She’s charmingly played in a role shared by Emerson Davis and Mia Williamson as a youngster, and as a young adult by the exciting discovery, Hailey Kilgore.
The Gods get up to all types of mischief, from the inevitable coup de théâtre tropical storm, to the car crash that brings about the meet-brute of Ti Moune and her light-skinned, aristocratic beau, Daniel Beauxhomme, played ably by Isaac Powell. And what are young adults without young love? This couple does not disappoint, grounding both cast and story, which spins out to encompass both Ti Moune’s much older adoptive parents and Daniel’s forebears. It’s a lineage so complicated, the production enlists shadow puppets to illustrate “The Sad Tale of the Beauxhommes,” and also the aforementioned Gods as they tinker with their creations.
It’s a lot to cram into a one-act musical, but actor-turned-director Michael Arden manages to keep all these balls in the air. The one-two punch of choreographer Camille A. Brown and costume designer Clint Ramos—also working with found objects as fabulous as Coke can fishtails and sky-high headdresses—keep things moving in some of the most stunning dance numbers currently up on the boards.
Anyone expecting the union of Ti Moune and Daniel Beauxhomme to come off as flawlessly as Stephen Flaherty is able to meld Caribbean rhythms with Broadway melodies, might want to remind themselves they are not at a Disney musical. And while loose ends are tied up with a wedding, it’s not the couple the audience has invested in. Still, by forgoing the happy ending, the team behind Once on This Island manages to deliver something more vacillating and ephemeral than the sand they play upon.
PHOTO CREDITS: Joan Marcus
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