Director's Notes from James C. Yeara
On that island where rivers run deep, where the sea sparkling in the sun earns it the name “Jewel of the Antilles”, the tops of the mountains are bare… the peasants live amid flamboyants, poinsettias, azaleas, ficus, eucalyptus, and magnolias -their colors raging over the countryside and blending roads into hills, hills into forests. Multicolored flora defy the destructiveness of man and climate to spring eternally back to life. This miracle the peasants attribute to the gods. My Love, My Love by Rosa Guy
So begins the novel from which Once On This Island was adapted. Music director Jason Dashew has long longed to do Once On This Island, the perfect melding of Paul Sills’ Story Theatre (borrowing from classic oral folk tale tradition, actors play both narrator and characters, shifting to play muliple roles) and Broadway musical. A hit from its 1990 Broadway debut, Once On This Island has been pleasing audiences ever since; it’s how our music director and choreographer fell in love during a production of this musical she was in “once upon a time.”
Once On This Island calls for performers who can act, sing, and dance; stagecraft that calls to mind the shimmering hues of the Caribbean; musicians who can call up the varied rhythms from love ballads, Calypso folk songs, and entrancing voodoo drums; and audiences who can use their imaginations and feel the heat of the Antilles forest, while sitting in the cold of a Delmar building.
The brilliance of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s jambalaya of storytelling and music (they went on to create Ragtime and Seussical together) is what enticed Jason Dashew to request Once On This Island year after year. I hope that you are as pleased with the results as he is, and that you will, in the lyrics that bring a close to the musical, remember the tale told for you today, “For out of what we live / And we believe, / Our lives become / The stories that we weave.”