Presented by the Kean Theatre Conservatory
Book & Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens
Music by Stephen Flaherty
Directed by J. Feliciano-Sanchez Moser
Musical Direction by Mark Baronr

Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty have been collaborating for forty years. One of their works, Once on This Island, weaves detailed language and Caribbean-style music into a moving one-act musical.

This musical is an adaptation of Trinidadian-American Rosa Guy’s 1985 novel My Love, My Love; or The Peasant Girl, itself an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. In an interview with The Horn Book Magazine, Guy said, “I’m a storyteller. I want my readers to know people, to laugh with them, to be glad with, to be angry with, to despair with people. And I want them to have hope with people. I want a reader of my work … to care.”

Ahrens and Flaherty Once on This Island similarly invites us to care as we follow Ti Moune through ‘the Jewel of the Antilles’, or Haiti, as she grows, encounters society, and experiences love, hope, sacrifice and determination, joy, loss, and the fickleness and loyalty of the gods.