The success of ”Once on This Island,” the fairy tale Caribbean musical opening at Chicago`s Shubert Theatre Tuesday, is a Broadway Cinderella story. In an era when $8 million musicals are commonplace (and frequently short-lived), ”Once on This Island” was brought to the stage for just $300,000.
Based on the prize-winning but somewhat obscure 1985 novel ”My Love, My Love, or the Peasant Girl” by Rosa Guy, which was itself inspired by Hans Christian Andersen`s ”The Little Mermaid,” the show was created by two relative unknowns and premiered at the distantly off-Broadway Playwrights Horizons Theatre.
A seamless, non-stop, 90-minute production employing minimal if colorful sets and an 11-member cast backed by six musicians, it tells the story of a naive young peasant girl`s impossible love for an aristocrat she can never hope to marry-and does so entirely in song. There are no revolving sets, no winches, no falling chandeliers, and no one flies through the air.
Yet the little show proved so popular with critics and theatergoers that, after its seven-week run at Playwrights Horizons, it was moved to Broadway`s Booth Theatre and played for 14 months.
Now, with Chicago`s Darius de Haas in the male lead role of Daniel Beauxhomme and Vanita Harbour of the Broadway cast starring as the island peasant girl Ti Moune, it has embarked on a road company tour that will take it to 24 American cities through next February, with more bookings planned through 1993.
”It`s the biggest thing that ever happened to me,” said de Haas, a graduate of Chicago`s Columbia College as well as New York`s American Musical and Dramatic Academy who previously performed in regional productions of
”Dreamgirls,” ”Hair,” ”Pippin,” ”A Christmas Carol,” ”Project”
and ”Pastel Refugees.” His parents, vocalist Geraldine de Haas and bassist Eddie de Haas, are prominent members of Chicago`s jazz community.
”Once on This Island” is about the biggest thing that`s happened to almost all concerned-and a most improbable phenomenon. The Caribbean island nation in which it is set-called ”the Jewel of the Antilles” in both book and script-is Haiti, a place most people associate with cruel despotism, the dreaded Ton Tons Macoute, voodoo and abysmal poverty.
Though Guy, all the characters in her novel and the entire 11-member cast are black-and the story is about the bitterly divisive color line that separates Haiti`s French Mulatto aristocracy from its full-blooded black peasantry-the two authors of the show, Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty (music), are white.
The music and accents have a Caribbean flavor and the dances convey a kindred verisimilitude. But the music has more in common with the contemporary stage music of Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber, though it is more natural and melodic.
”I would like there to be more drums,” said novelist Guy, who was born in Trinidad, grew up in Harlem and lived in Haiti for periods in the 1960s and 1970s.
The director/choreographer Graciela Daniele, has no West Indian or African roots, either. She`s from Argentina, the most European of Latin American countries. Her last Broadway outing was the controversial, macabre and quite violent ”Dangerous Games”-a sort of ”Tango Argentina” with bullwhips and knives that served as allegory for the atmosphere and mentality of life under the Argentine generals.
”That was a political show,” Daniele said. ” `Once on This Island` is something else, something very innocent and beautiful. After hearing the second or third number, I felt I had to do it. By the end, I was crying.”
Despite the creators` disparate and seemingly inimical backgrounds and the show`s other oddities-this is a fairy tale with a speeding Mercedes Benz in it-”Once on This Island” embraces the heart and soul of Guy`s beautifully written little book and provides a theatrical experience that is simple, genuine and profoundly universal.
It`s a story within a story, a play within a play, a tale told by Haitian villagers to a little girl-”Little Ti Moune,” winningly played by Nilyne Fields (”The Babysitter`s Club”)-to calm her fears at the approach of a hurricane.
The villagers act out the parts of the story`s characters, including the local gods who intercede to provide the most dramatic and lyrical turns of plot: Papa Ge, Demon of Death; Agwe, God of Water; Asaka, Mother of the Earth; and Erzulie, Goddess of Love.
Daniel Beauxhomme, a young mulatto aristocrat of French-Haitian descent, speeds through a stormy night in his Mercedes (represented on stage by two flashlights). There is a terrible crash, but he is rescued by an older, more womanly Ti Moune, a beautiful village maiden with a gift for dance. Pape Ge wants the young man`s life, but Ti Moune, consumed by love, bargains for it.
She restores Beauxhomme to health. He is charmed by her, but returns nevertheless to the city and his old life, which includes his high-born intended, a rich mulatto girl named Andrea. Ti Moune pursues him to the city, where she encounters unyielding racial and class barriers. The ending is bitter-sweet, but rendered in a fable delightful enough to charm the most anxious child.
It`s a story that could have been set in the ancient Greece of mythology, or the Norse land of the Valkyries or among the Indians of the American plains. Indeed, the universal sense of human life`s interdependence with nature and its governing deities is overpowering and the principal reason for the musical`s success.
The titles of the show`s 19 musical numbers express its soul and spirit, including ”We Dance,” ”One Small Girl,” ”Waiting for Life,” ”And the Gods Heard Her Prayer,” ”Rain,” ”Forever Yours,” ”The Sad Tale of the Beauxhommes,” ”Mama Will Provide,” ”Some Say” and ”A Part of Us.”
The talented cast blend flawlessly as an ensemble. They were observed doing a full, uninterrupted, 90-minute run-through of the entire production in a New York rehearsal hall just three weeks after they had all come together and a better performance couldn`t be wished for on opening night.
Harbour (Ti Moune), remembered also as Rika Price on ”One Life to Live,” is joined by three others from the Broadway cast: Sheila Gibbs (Mama Euralte), Gerry McIntyre (a most formidable Papa Ge) and East St. Louis` Keith Tyrone (Armand), whose credits also list Broadway`s ”Bubbling Brown Sugar”
and ”Starlight Express.”
De Haas, just 23, who could win fame with his tenor singing voice alone, shares newcomer billing with an extraordinarilly versatile and lissome Monique Cintron (Andrea). A graduate of New York`s High School of Performing Arts, a veteran of ”The Cosby Show” and a cast member in ”Fame, the Musical,”
she`ll be appearing in Spike Lee`s soon-to-be-released film ”Malcolm X.”
The other newcomers to the show include Natalie Venetia Belcon (Erzulie, Goddess of Love), like Guy, a native of Trinidad; Carol Dennis (Asaka, Mother of the Earth), who performed in Broadway`s ”The Wiz” and was the singing voice in the film ”The Josephine Baker Story;” James Stovall (Agwe, God of Water), a star and coproducer of Langston Hughes` ”Black Nativity;” and Miles Watson (Tonton Julian), who appeared as a dramatic actor in ”Sea of Love,” ”Presumed Innocent” and ”Quick Change.”
Ahrens and Flaherty seem a little awed by their show`s success but find it in no way unwarranted, crediting Guy`s book (”something very special”)
and the cast members (”hundreds of kids auditioned for it”) for its unique charm and appeal.
”It`s not really a musical,” Flaherty said. ”It`s a story told in music.”
They also feel they`ve paid their dues as a team. They previously created a children`s play, the Off-Broadway farcical comedy ”Lucky Stiff,” which received mixed reviews, and numerous workshop endeavors.
”We`ve been working together for about 10 years,” Ahrens said. ”We`re not really newcomers.”
Their next production in the works is a musical based on the Peter O`Toole film comedy ”My Favorite Year.”
Guy, the author of 17 books, has seen both the Broadway and road show companies perform ”Once on This Island,” and employs the word ”wonderful” in describing the work of both. Though she acknowledges the awful aspects of life in Haiti-the despotism and poverty-she thinks it has been much misunderstood and preyed upon by the United States and Europe and hopes the show will make it better appreciated.
”I have a love/hate relationship with Haiti,” said Guy, who now lives just off Central Park on New York`s Upper West Side. ”It is absolutely the loveliest island in the Caribbean. I love the people. I love the beautiful mountains. But there is absolute poverty. Ninety-five percent of the people are poor. Ninety-nine percent are uneducated. No one goes to school. Yet I have always felt perfectly safe there.
”It didn`t have to be this way. The United States and France could have helped Haiti as they have so many other nations. But it was the only country in which a slave revolt was successful, and many Americans were afraid.”
After ”Once on This Island,” they should be considerably less so.
