Gil Hates Everything

Flaherty and Ahrens are a very reliable writing team aren’t they? I haven’t heard or seen anything by them that’s been less than good. “Anastasia” is a lovely movie, “Lucky Stiff” was funny, and you can expect positive writeups for “Ragtime” and “Seussical” in the next couple of months. I like that. So what about this?

“Once On This Island” is about an island with rich colonials and poor natives. A shipwrecked orphan girl is adopted by a native couple, rescues a colonial boy from a car crash and saves his life by making a bargain with the trickster god from the pantheon which looks after (or at least over) the island. Their relationship is naturally unpopular with the rest of the colonials, including the boy’s fiancee. It all goes a bit pear-shaped, the trickster god claims her life, but there’s one of those supposedly happy endings which isn’t really happy because, y’know, she fucking dies, but at least she gets reincarnated as a tree which cracks open the gates which separate the colonials from the natives; her sacrifice has brought the people together, etc.

This is a sweet one-act show. The songs are energetic and feature plenty of chorus work (when I saw it at Cap I don’t think the cast of twenty-plus people ever left the stage), the story is sweet and touching and convincing, and comes through pretty clearly in the songs, and the gods inspire suitable rage in you at their whole divine-isolation thing and their treatment of the girl… which, strangely enough, could be confused with their not existing at all. (If you’ve read Pratchett’s “Nation” then there are slight touches of that in this. And if you haven’t, then hurry it up.)

The soundtrack is missing a couple of songs, such as “The Sad Tale Of The Beauxhommes”, but it clocks in at a very solid 50 minutes, with twelve songs which should convince you that it’s worth a look. “Pray” in particular is a bit of a standout.

Downsides: well, it has no particular subplots and you’ve probably seen the story before. And if you don’t like this style of music then it’s musically a bit monotonous. I liked it, in a dose this size; my complaint is with the recording as opposed to the material: the instrumentation on the recording is a little weak and cheap. That hasn’t happened very often during Gil Hates Musicals, but when it does it’s a bit of a fail (I still shudder at that recording of “Annie” – and not just because it was “Annie”). The island is these characters’ whole world; the music should sound suitably world-encompassing. Fortunately (for me :) it sounded much better live.

Random Panda awards this seven out of ten pieces of bamboo; it does exactly what it sets out to, and makes for an entirely reasonable and family-friendly musical evening. (And it puts the boot into gods, which as usual I have no objection to.)

(originally posted May 19, 2009)