Review: ONCE ON THIS ISLAND Exceeds All Expectations at Benedum Center

For whatever reason, despite two high-profile Broadway productions and a handful of standard audition songs, Once on This Island has always flown a little under the radar. It's a cult favorite, a B-side, a show you've heard of but have probably only seen as a middling middle-school production (thanks to MTI's inclusion of the show as one of the early Junior Versions piloted by the program). But despite this, I'm going to the mat for OOTI as a nearly perfect show. It's better than the B-list; I'll even commit the blasphemy of saying it's better than Ahrens and Flaherty's other masterpiece, Ragtime. It's that good, and director/choreographer Gerry McIntyre (yes, the calypso singer from the Dreamcoat movie) has brought a slightly maximalist aesthetic to the show that makes the Pittsburgh CLO production pop like never before. 

Set in Haiti in the wake of a natural disaster (shades of the 2010 Haitian crisis), our story begins as a tale within a tale. To comfort a young girl (Eden S. Greene), the villagers huddle in an old mansion and tell her a folk tale of a beautiful peasant girl (Najah Hetsberger) who became a pawn in the hands of the gods of Vodou. As Erzulie (Hailey Thomas), goddess of love debates with Papa Ge (Darious Harper), god of death, on whose power is stronger, they place the girl Ti Moune in the path of wealthy Daniel (Mason Reeves) to see what happens. But their struggle is more than one of class: Ti Moune is black, and Daniel is biracial, pitting Haiti's long history of colorism against them as well.

Based very loosely on the archetypal "Little Mermaid" story by Hans Christian Andersen, OOTI is an astonishingly smart show for how simple it immediately appears. It is forever appearing to be a pure fable, yet at any given moment is dissecting racism, sexism, colonialism and the male gaze. Lynn Ahrens's book and lyrics do fascinating things with the intersection of male gaze and colonialism: the show is written from Ti Moune's perspective but frequently cuts away to the perspectives of everyone else around her. To us in the audience, and to Ti Moune, she is a winsome, innocent ingenue chasing true love. To the view of everyone else, Ti Moune is a rich man's mistress in a relationship that can only be about sex for proximity to comfort. We get both sides almost evenly, because both sides are true; everyone but Ti Moune is speaking a different language of privilege and exploitation. What she sees as a romantic "tale as old as time," everyone else sees as the oldest profession, because it's what they've been taught to see.

Najah Hetsberger imbues Ti Moune with extraordinary light and life. She dances with simultaneous precision and abandon, and sings with one of those brilliant, crystal-clear Disney Princess voices that comes out of nowhere and cuts through all the chaos with every note. Hetsberger is a wonderfully subtle actress as well, and she approaches the role's double-consciousness elements masterfully: we can buy her as fairy-tale heroine and sexy, upwardly-mobile peasant girl at the same time depending on whose perspective we are seeing. One of her best moments is a tiny one, but it's the moment that stuck with me the most. When her one true love (or maybe her lover) Daniel, played with sensitivity but disaffecting callousness by Mason Reeves, holds her in her arms and sings her "Some Girls," Hetsberger is caught in a strange place. Her man is telling her that he loves everything about her, but not-so-subtly implying with every line that she'll never be more than his mistress. With every contradictory line Reeves sings, Hetsberger shifts just a little, until she finally kisses him to stop her own doubts about how she feels. It's his song, but it's HER moment, and watching her face is a master class.

As the scared girl, who doubles as a child Ti Moune, Eden S. Greene is wonderfully accomplished for an elementary-school kid. Pittsburgh natives and local favorites Melessie Clark and Brady D. Patsy stand out as Ti Moune's adopted parents Mama Euralie and Tonton Julian. They both bring vibrant personality, warm humor and enormous voices to the roles, and their youth in contrast to the old peasants they play becomes a great visual gag at their introduction. But of course, it's easy for the gods to steal the show in this piece. Frenchie Davis gets the biggest song in the show, with the Afro-Caribbean bop "Mama Will Provide." Zephaniah Divine's baritenor is flexible and fluid like water, leading him through a number of tricky and showy passages. Hailey Thomas's Erzulie brings a warm voice and calming presence befitting the goddess of love, though she has sparks of welcome humor when she applies her power, Cupid-like, to get things moving. Finally, last year's Lola, Darius Harper, is an absolute blast as death god Papa Ge. Adopting an oversized top hat (like his Voudo inspiration Baron Samedi or Papa Ghede), Harper is all angles, bared teeth and wild eyes. Complete with a cackle and a great high baritone, he's the perfect comic villain too likable to really feel evil. Harper's eccentric performance, hat and all, is deeply reminiscent of cult Disney figure the Hatbox Ghost, which made me grin more than once. 

This is a heavily choreographic show, with dance and movement being used at all times to communicate even more than the words. Director/choreographer Gerry McIntyre appeared in the original Broadway production of OOTI, so he knows it inside and out. More than once he plays on the contrast between the way strong Afro-Caribbean dance physicality is viewed as part of nature and life by the peasants, but seen as earthy, exotic or overtly sexual by the biracial rich. Near the show's climax, Ti Moune is called upon to dance at a ball, and she locks into the way she's always danced at home. At first she's looked on as an oddity or an exhibition, but soon the servants and even the rich men of the mansion are dancing with her, loosening their bodies and allowing themselves to feel the music and move with abandon. The subtext is clear: Ti Moune's joy and authenticity allows them, at least for a few moments, the freedom to accept, even embrace, their blackness. But then the song ends and that moment of meeting across the aisle disappears. OOTI moves towards its ending, which is sad, slightly bizarre, and open to a certain amount of interpretation.

Bryce Cutler's scenic design, along with Paul Miller's lighting design, is Disney parks levels of immersive. I have never seen an LED and projection design that looked this good, or this three-dimensional; in fact, I repeatedly found myself watching for a coup de theatre where someone would step through what had been assumed to be a static panel. Anyone who says LEDs and projections are lazy scenic design is full of it, and this production proves that a masterful hand at it can be just as good as any painted or sculpted backdrop. The music direction by James Cunningham keeps things moving, keeping the grooves tight on Pittsburgher Stephen Flaherty's score. (I once got to play in the pit for a production of this show with the percussionist of Rusted Root, and it was a musical high point of my career.) 

Summer may be moving towards its inevitable close, with the nights getting shorter even as the days get hotter, but the CLO is not slowing down yet. With two shows left on the docket for the year, both of them titanic in scale, August is going to be even hotter than June and July, onstage as well as off. My statement earlier this month still holds true: never bet against CLO. This right here is "why we tell the story."

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