Copious Notes

Six veteran Lexington musical theater performers team up with director Stephen Currens for Beguiled Again, a musical revue of the songs of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. It plays Sept. 24-Oct. 4 at the Downtown Arts Center. We caught up with the cast at a rehearsal Sept. 22. The lights and set weren’t quite together, but we got a good idea what it’s going to look like.

Ti Moune (Tai-Kristin Smedley) is oblvious to plans being made for her by Erzulie (Alicia Helm McCorvey), Papa Ge (Jason Thompson) and Asaka (Tamera Izlar). Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

After several summers of giving us musicals with songs we know by heart, SummerFest delivers a show with a story that will stay in our hearts.

And some of the tunes may stay with us too.

Like Hair (SummerFest 2008) and Jesus Christ Superstar (2004), writer Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty’s Once on This Island is a distinctly contemporary musical, and it scored a 1991 Tony Award nomination for best musical (Will Rogers Follies won). A lot of people who have seen the show love it, which means it should gain some new adherents this weekend as it closes out SummerFest at the Arboretum.

In some ways, Island seems ideally suited to the Arboretum venue. It is set on a Caribbean island and its story is intertwined with nature. The gods of earth (Tamera Izlar) and the ocean (Luther Lewis III) are co-conspirators in the story of Ti Moune (Tarynn Grundy as a girl and Tai-Kristin Smedley as an adult), a peasant girl orphaned in a flood whose love and innocence eventually conquers the cruelty and vapidity of racism.

Ti Moune is convinced she was saved in the flood for a purpose, and later comes to believe that is to save Daniel (Adam Fister), a rich boy injured in a car crash during another harrowing storm. Ti Moune’s love for Daniel is at the center of a bet between Papa Ge (Jason Thompson), the demon of death, and Erzulie (Alicia Helm McCorvey), the goddess of love, as to which one is stronger.

Death, “can stop a heart from beating, but not from loving,” Erzulie tells Papa Ge in a line you should pay attention to.

The strength in Margo Buchanan’s production is several of the performances and her often telling staging.

One of the best moments is when Daniel sings Some Girls to Ti Moune. All the while, on a platform above and behind them, Andrea (Taylor Eldred), the rich girl Daniel’s been promised to since childhood, is getting ready for the dance they will all attend. It’s visually as telling as the lyric, “Some girls you marry, and some girls you love.” Pay attention to that one, too.

Fister you’ll remember as Claude in Hair. Smedley is the first performer in the show who truly fills the Arboretum when she enters singing Waiting for Life. She provides the show with a sweet star to root for. Thompson as her nemisis, Papa Ge, is also a commanding presence in a his voice, laugh and lithe movement.

As Ti Moune’s adoptive mother, Julie-Ann Aguhob builds on her head turning performance at Grand Night for Singing in June, though she was one of several performers plagued by microphone problems Thursday night.

Despite the appropriateness of the outdoor setting, the show sometimes has trouble filling the Arboretum, in some cases due to the lightness of Flaherty’s touch. Some airy, transitional moments have trouble competing with the surroundings, such as the Arboretum’s location near two hosptials (with emergency rooms).

What does work really well in that atmosphere is Island’s format with storytellers relaying the tale in its immediacy and history of class conflict and island legend. Even if, at the back of the amphitheater, you miss some subtle moments between characters, you get the broad themes of nature and love overcoming the unnatural barriers people put between themselves.

No, not everything works in Once on This Island. But a lot does, and who doesn’t want a little island get away on a summer night?

SummerFest closes out its 2009 season with the musical Once on This Island by writer Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty. The musical tells the story of Ti Moune, a peasant girl in Haiti who believes the gods spared her life so she could save a rich boy, Daniel, and fall in love with him. The production is directed by Margo Buchanan. Performances are July 22-26 at the Arboretum on Alumni Drive. Photos by Rich Copley | staff.

Feature: UK Opera students spend summer exploring musical theater in Once on This Island.