Tony Award Nominee Once On This Island Comes to Arts Barn Stage

FROM THE CITY PRESS RELEASE: "The story of The Little Mermaid is re-mastered as the Arts Barn Theater presents a KAT 2nd Stage Production of Once On This Island, with music by Stephen Flaherty, and book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. The show runs May 6 through 22, 2011, with performances on Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Admission is $18, $16 for City residents, $9 for children and students (through grade 12). This show is recommended for audiences aged 10 and older. Parental guidance is suggested.

Once On This Island is an enchanting musical fable that tells the story of forbidden love between a peasant girl and a rich city boy whom she saves from death. Originally inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the Broadway show transports the story to a Caribbean island where social prejudice divides the island. A group of storytellers tell the tale of the young peasant girl, Ti Moune, who was saved from a flood by the gods as a child and raised by a pair of kindly old peasants. As she grows up, however, Ti Moune longs for a grander life than the one she faces and, inspired by the sight of a young and handsome rich boy driving past in a white car, prays to the gods to grant her wish.

The New York Times calls it “A sugar-and-cartoon-free answer to The Little Mermaid. A 90-minute Caribbean fairy tale told in rousing song and dance, this show is a joyous marriage of the slick and the folkloric, of the hard-nosed sophistication of Broadway musical theater and the indigenous culture of a tropical isle.”