Once on This Island, the 1990 musical now in a superb production
at Theatre Three, is a Caribbean retelling of the Little Mermaid fairy
tale. Disney's 1989 animated hit, The Little Mermaid, was another
version of the same story, also with strong Caribbean elements.

The almost concurrent adaptations might seem an odd coincidence.
With the long lead time for musicals, it's highly unlikely either
project copied the other. So why would two of the most promising composer-
lyricist teams - Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty for Once on This
Island, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken for The Little Mermaid - be
attracted to the same well-worn story?

Pre-Christian myths about gods and demons have always been especially
popular sources for musical theater - especially as copyright laws
got more strict. (You don't have to pay to adapt a legend.) The classic
fairy tales, most of which date from the 18th and 19th centuries,
seem to be our era's closest equivalent. They have the same aura of
magic, strike the same deep psychic chords - what it means be lovable,
to love, to belong.

Jamaica is a long way from Hans Christian Andersen's Denmark, but
obviously the peppery flavors of reggae and calypso attracted both
composers. A bullfrog-voiced crab gives the Disney film's Oscar--winning
song, Under the Sea, an infectious island beat. Once on This Island's
rousing first-act finale, Mama Will Provide, gets the same kind
of boost from a shimmying earth goddess.

But both scores owe more to Broadway musical traditions than to
Bob Marley or even Harry Belafonte. They have fine ballads and funny
patter songs galore. The Caribbean elements only add a bit of spice
to what remains essentially homey fare.

With his string of Disney scores, Mr. Menken has gone on to become
even more popular than Andrew Lloyd Webber. (If you doubt it, ask
a random sample of friends to sing Be Our Guest or The Music of the
Night. There'll be no contest as to which more can recall.)

Mr. Flaherty isn't so famous yet, though high hopes are pinned
on his and Ms. Ahrens' new show, Ragtime, still being tinkered with
in Toronto before it hits Broadway about a year from now. But Once
on This Island has been influential. It's hard to hear the score of
last year's Broadway smash, Rent, without thinking of Mr. Flaherty's brand of poignant, quirky melodies.

As for the librettists' decision to adapt the same story, there'snothing new in that. From the beginning of musical theater, different adaptations of the same story tend to crop up simultaneously. The myth of Orpheus was hot during the baroque era. Leoncavallo, who also wrote I pagliacci, turned out his version of the novel La boheme about
the same time Puccini did - about 100 years before the same story
became Rent.

In fact, during the 18th century it was common for different composers
to set the very same libretto, not just adaptations of the same story.

The Little Mermaid story isn't even the only fairy tale that has
flourished on our musical stages during the last decade. Beauty and
the Beast, also by Mr. Ashman and Mr. Menken, is a big Broadway hit
right now, and Into the Woods, a weaving of several fairy-tale classics,
was one of Stephen Sondheim's most popular shows ever.

The Phantom of the Opera has strong fairy-tale elements, too. The
plot isn't all that far from Beauty and the Beast: A fearful monster
desires love and fixates on a beloved.

The appeal of that story produced a better-publicized coincidence
than the simultaneous mermaid musicals - a veritable Phantom pile-
up. Besides the megahit Lloyd Webber version, an almost simultaneous
treatment by Arthur Kopit and Murray Yeston, Phantom, has earned respect
and many regional productions. There was also a third traveling version,
its origins in London, that adapted old songs and took advantage
of the furor over the Lloyd Webber.

You might also chalk up Mr. Sondheim's most recent musical, Passion,
in this column of Phantom adaptations. (Plano Repertory Theatre will
give Dallas audiences their first chance to see it next month.) The
proximate source was an Italian movie. But the basic situation is
very like Phantom with the genders reversed: A woman who is considered
plain, even monstrously ugly, becomes obsessed with a handsome young
soldier. He comes to know her soul and even to love her, though she
is doomed anyway.

The appeal of The Little Mermaid story is similar. What both sets
of writers have taken from Hans Christian Andersen is the idea of
a bold but naive young female who falls in love with someone from
a different world and sacrifices herself to join him. Once on This
Island reverts to the sort of real-life situation that perhaps inspired
the fable in the first place. Ms. Ahrens divides her heroine and the
man she loves by social caste and wealth.

The Disney version, able to show a "real" mermaid, keeps the fairy
tale's division of the lovers into sea and land creatures. But the
animated film confuses the myth by adding several others. When Disney's mermaid, Ariel, sells her voice to the wicked octopus-witch, the
story becomes an underwater, gender-bent Faust. When Ariel's father,
the sea god, redeems her by taking the punishment on himself, the
animated film adds on Christian motifs, as so many Disney movies do.
The cartoon also tacks on a happy ending.

Once on This Island, on the other hand, is resolutely pagan, resolutely
tragic in its treatment of the basic plot. The ending does manage
to cheat a little: Once the story is resolved, the format, which filters
the plot through a chorus of narrators, allows Mr. Flaherty to tack
on an upbeat musical epilogue.

That storytelling format, though, probably tells us the most about
what attracted both sets of creators to write musicals based on the
Andersen tale. Ms. Ahrens' and Mr. Flaherty's songs trace a portrait
of heroic love that braves dangers and makes every sacrifice for the
beloved. When that love is betrayed, life is no longer worth living.
The musical's message is that the life of the person who was willing
to dare all this and to love despite everything is worth celebrating
and passing down from generation to generation.

Isn't that what fairy tales are all about?

1997 The Dallas Morning News All Rights Reserved The Dallas Morning News, 02-02-1997, pp 2C.