The Rise and Reboot of Broadway's Beloved Once on This Island

The 2017-2018 theater season has officially begun, and a slew of highly anticipated musicals and plays, both brand new and revisited, are set to bow. Broadway.com's Fall Preview series captures the stars and creators bringing these stories center stage in the new season.

Michael Arden wanted to put Ti Moune in a parking lot.

It was 2011. Having debuted on Broadway as an actor at 20, headlining a Broadway musical at 24 and serving as assistant director of a Broadway musical at 26, the ambitious then almost-30-year-old was ready for his own directorial challenge: to reboot the well-loved 1990 hit Once on This Island, about a young girl who goes on an emotional and tuneful journey to save the man she loves but cannot have.

“I wanted to create a piece of theater that was really driven by people,” Arden explains, adding that an empty parking lot would be the perfect starting point for his stripped-down vision. “We’d bring instruments, a keyboard, a tub and some spoons…whatever we had. We'd lift our voices and bodies to tell the story.”
 

When he was cast as Younger Brother in a 2013 concert staging of their Tony-winning epic Ragtime at Avery Fisher Hall, Arden sprung his idea on Once on This Island scribe Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty with a four-song demo CD of reworked Island songs he’d produced with vocal orchestrator AnnMarie Milazzo. The Tony-winning creators were admittedly wary of an untested young director, but Arden says he “kept on them” over the years, making sure they saw his eventual Broadway directorial debut, the acclaimed Deaf West Spring Awakening, which earned him a 2016 Tony Award nomination. Finally, Ahrens and Flaherty sat down with Arden, along with their original orchestrator Michael Starobin, and talked. “Lo and behold, Michael had a vision and it was really, really good,” says Ahrens.

Ahrens and Flaherty are understandably protective of Once on This Island, the little-show-that-could that launched their wildly successful musical-theater careers (their Anastasia is also currently on the boards). Ahrens first discovered the show’s basis, Rosa Guy’s slim YA novel My Love, My Love: or The Peasant Girl, in the discount bin of a Barnes and Noble bookstore. “It was $1.50 at most,” she says. “I read the first page and said, ‘I’ll take it!’ I didn’t even haggle!” Ahrens knew the story would appeal to her writing partner Flaherty, with whom she’d just spent four years developing Lucky Stiff, a murder-mystery farce that closed fast off-Broadway in 1988, because “he’d been longing to do something with a ballad or two.” Once they dug in, Flaherty says they wrote the show in six months, the fastest they’ve ever worked: “We had been writing a farce with little or no emotional content prior, so I had years of emotion bottled up in me!”
 

Directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, Once on This Island was given the final slot on the 1989-1990 season at Playwrights Horizon, the same theater that premiered Lucky Stiff two years prior. Flaherty remembers begging his grandmother to make the trip from Pittsburgh to see the show during the brief scheduled run out of fear she’d never get to see one of his shows on Broadway. Opening on May 6, the musical was an immediate smash, moving to Broadway’s Booth Theatre just four months after its run off-Broadway. Once on This Island earned eight Tony Award nominations, including recognition for its book and score and a nod for effervescent star LaChanze.

Finally back on the boards, Arden’s staging of Once on This Island will start performances not in a parking lot, but at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre on November 9, with opening night set for December 3. Dance pioneer Camille A. Brown makes her Broadway debut as choreographer. Interestingly, the show’s creators, who have seen it staged around the world (including the London production that won the Olivier Award for Best Musical) have never seen it in the round. “It invites the audience to be a part of it,” Arden says. For Flaherty, the venue is the perfect setting for a show about storytelling: “The story circles…ancestors tell stories in circles.”



A joyful one-act, Once on This Island kicks off when a group of natives on an unnamed island tries to comfort a young girl during a terrible storm with the fable of Ti Moune and her unbridled love for Daniel, the wealthy, light-skinned boy from across the island. (Newcomers Hailey Kilgore and Isaac Powell play the roles in the revival.) In the jubilant finale, the islanders explain “why we tell the story,” and in 2017, Arden thinks the show will resonate anew. “Look at what’s unfolding in my home state of Texas,” he says of the destruction of Hurricane Harvey. “How people rebuild is an important thing to examine. Not only with brick and mortar, but how we tell stories and which stories we choose to tell. This is a story about inclusion and one young black girl’s sacrifice and how love wins over hate. The metaphor speaks for itself.”

What is truly groundbreaking about the new Once on This Island is the casting of the four gods that guide Ti Moune’s journey: Asaka of earth, Agwé of water, Erzulie of love and Papa Ge of death, characters inspired by actual Haitian voodoo gods. Traditionally, Asaka and Erzulie have been cast with African-American women and Agwe and Papa Ge with African-American men. Current Cats star Quentin Earl Darrington, a powerful Coalhouse Walker in the last Broadway Ragtime, is the most traditional of the four, playing Agwe. Although her natural warmth and rich voice make Tony winner Lea Salonga an obvious performer to deliver Erzulie’s beautiful ballad “Human Heart,” as the biggest Filipina musical-theater star, she’s actually a bold choice. And the casting of the remaining gods refreshingly push boundaries of gender. Broadway veteran Merle Dandridge, half African-American, half Korean, will play Papa Ge, usually played by a man, and Alex Newell, a fan favorite when he joined Glee as trans student Unique, will make his Broadway debut as Asaka, who delivers the popular showstopper “Mama Will Provide.” (Arden: “It’s really something. You’re in for a treat.”)
 

Musically, fans of the show can expect a radically different sound. “It’ll be as acoustic as possible, if not entirely acoustic,” Flaherty explains. “It’s ‘Once on This Island unplugged.’” Arden adds: “We’re taking the electricity out of it. No synthesizers. No brass instruments and utilizing the human voice a lot more.” In addition, the production has engaged John Bertles of Bash the Trash to create musical instruments for the cast of 18 built out of found items like car parts, bottles and other dumpster-diving discoveries. “Our rehearsal room looks like a junkyard,” Arden laughs.

Ultimately, the greatest thing the new production of Once on This Island has going for it is the show itself. “I think it’s the perfect show,” shares Arden. “There’s such heart and honesty and simplicity in the storytelling, and it speaks to the child in everyone. It wears its heart on its sleeve, and we’re all better for it.”

"Once on This Island" begins on November 9 and opens on December 3 at the Circle in the Square Theatre

Photos: Caitlin McNaney | Hair Stylist & Makeup Artist: Margina Dennis | Styling: Heather Newberger | Styling Intern: Taylor Freeman