Once on This Island

CORNERING THE MARKET Krystal Metcalfe and Austin Moore, from left, take to the streets.

Ahrens and Flaherty’s 1990 Caribbean fairy tale might have the least-convincing happy ending in musical-theater history. After dying of a broken heart because her rich, light-skinned boyfriend has decided he could never marry a dark-skinned peasant, the heroine, Ti Moune, is changed into a tree by the gods, who feel sort of bad since they brought the two together in the first place. Improbably, Ti Moune is pleased with this arrangement, her spirit smiling benevolently on her former lover’s offspring when she should be hurling acorns at their dear little heads.

Then again, stranger things than forgiveness can happen on this particular island, located in a fairyland version of the French Antilles. Most revivals follow the original staging’s lead and evoke the Caribbean by way of Technicolor native garb and faux Impressionist sets painted by some dime-store Gauguin. Lococo, however, ingeniously relocates the storytellers to a corner in an urban neighborhood (evoked with impressive detail by Ian Zywica’s naturalistic set). This way the characters become immigrants telling a tale from their homeland, at once justifying the folkloric exaggerations and subtly reinforcing the show’s point about the importance of the stories we tell ourselves, in this case because they serve as a connection to a home that’s geographically distant.

Too bad the cast members can’t quite pull off the lush score. They have exuberance to spare, but they lack confidence, and when singing they can’t seem to locate the tune. No matter how imaginative the staging, a tone-deaf musical can’t end happily for anyone.

• More theater reviews
• More Theater articles