THEATER REVIEWS : Little of Interest Lives on ‘This Island’

Once, musicals were written, then tried out in towns such as Boston and Cleveland. There, the kinks were worked out before hitting Broadway. The results weren’t always wonderful, but the process was good enough for such people as Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers and Frank Loesser.

Now, musicals are “developed.” They’re sent through the mill known as workshops. Some authors swear by them. But the ones who do would have to explain something like “Once on This Island.”

Filled with wall-to-wall music, lots of flowery dresses and a nearly soporific languidness, this work by Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty (music) is the quintessential musical-in-development.

Its Orange County premiere, care of the Buena Park Civic Theatre, happens to be in the not-so-friendly confines of the multipurpose, multi-awkward Buena Park High School Performing Arts Complex. The show has a hard enough time placing us in the colonial world of the French Antilles, but the oddly angled, acoustic-poor complex does a good job of adding to the distance from the story.

And the story is what “Once on This Island” wants to be all about.

The BMI workshop is the particular mill “Island” was sent through, until it landed on the off-Broadway Playwrights Horizon stage in 1990. From there, it was on to Broadway and Tony nominations. It was the little show that did good. It was, even more, a musical that could be cast with brown, black and yellow faces, a kind of multicultural heaven for theaters everywhere.

Once it hit the road, such as its stop at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills in 1992, some wondered what all the fuss was about. You can double the wonder in 1994.

Ahrens builds her tale on a trite premise: A bad storm is about to pound the island, and the adults in a village try to calm the young ones’ fears with a story about courage.

Alas, the inner story is even more trite than the outer one: Ti Moune (April Weeden), growing into young womanhood, discovers a young, attractive non-native Frenchmen named Daniel (Vincent Aniceto) in a crashed car by the side of a road.

Against the traditions of both her poor brethren and French colonial society, she fights for a life of love with Daniel, who, of course, is engaged to a woman of his own caste. Think of “West Side Story” filtered through an ersatz-Michener milieu, and you begin to approach this narrative’s staleness.

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Precisely because the show’s entire premise is built on the power of storytelling, Ahrens’ book is much more impotent than one would usually notice in a musical. And at every point where the show needs the lift of music, Flaherty’s wan score carries no weight.

Actually, it feels lighter than air, liberally borrowing strains from Pat Metheny’s tropical-ized jazz and Sting’s reggae-isms, but with no distinctive passion of its own.

Only rarely, as in Daniel’s melodious “Some Girls,” do music and lyrics enlarge character--something one would assume a workshop process would hone to a fine, hard edge.

Unfortunately, director and musical director Tim Nelson’s staging feels lulled into the same kind of stupor in which the musical itself is stuck. There’s a kind of U.N. family-of-man comfiness that permeates both the staging and Jennifer Simpson’s not-very-Caribbean choreography, and they’re much too soft to support what is, after all, a drama of identity and will.

Nelson, though, is helped in one area, even as he’s hindered in another. While his very young cast, especially Weeden and Aniceto, is almost uniformly weak at delivering the songs, his band of skillful reed players and hot percussionists genuinely helps push the performance along when most needed.

Another shove comes from the wiry, wily Jeff Baker as the death god, Ti Moune’s own tempting Beelzebub.

* “Once on This Island,” Buena Park High School Performing Arts Complex, Magnolia Avenue and Academy Way, Buena Park. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; matinees Feb. 6 and 13, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 19. $8. (714) 562-3844. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

April Weeden: Ti Moune

Vincent Aniceto: Daniel Beauxhomme

Saidell Preston: Mama Euralie

John Moreno: Tonton Julian

Jeff Baker: Papa Ge

Billy Aniceto: Armand

Erin Stott: Andrea

A Buena Park Civic Theatre production of the Lynn Ahrens-Stephen Flaherty musical. Direction and musical direction by Tim Nelson. Choreography: Jennifer Simpson. Lights: Jim Bock. Sound: Jensen Crawford.