Fri 7/7-Sun 8/6
The 1995 “coming of age” play Once on This Island is based on the novel My Love, My Love by Rosa Guy, which relocates Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known fairy tale The Little Mermaid on an unnamed Caribbean island, In it a peasant girl falls in love with an upper-class boy and saves his life, but loses him — and her own life. Don’t worry about spoilers — you know how Romeo and Juliet ends, but it’s the getting there that’s enthralling. And a lot happens in this enchanting one-act play, which incorporates motifs and ideas from Caribbean syncretic religions such as Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria.
The Beck Center will be producing the play this month in its Senney Theatre helmed by director/choreographer Christopher Chase Carter, artistic director of Chicago’s Mercury Theater in his Cleveland directing debut. Beck’s resident musical director Larry Goodpaster handles the music end. The play features music by Stephen Flaherty and book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, an award-winning team who’ve been writing for stage, movies and TV for 40 years with such works as A Man of No Importance, Ragtime, Seussical and Anastasia.
The show is appropriate for kids. For more information about dates and to buy tickets go to beckcenter.org.