Last night we saw the musical Once on this Island at the open air theatre in Regents Park. I think that an open air theatre is a really creative idea and I really enjoyed being outside in nature where you never know what might happen. Weather, animals, or the environment around the theatre. I liked not knowing if a bird was going to swoop down into the middle of an important scene or whether or not it would start raining or we would hear people yelling or cars honking at each other. I liked the suspense of anything could happen during the show.
As for the show itself, I was a little disappointed I really wanted to like it but I didn’t. They didn’t really have a set which I heard was a really big part of why the show was supposed to be so good, the accents for me were very hard to understand so I was confused a lot of the show because I didn’t understand them too well, I don’t necessarily think that was their fault I think it was mostly on me because I could have read more about the show and done things to prepare to watch the show and know what was happening. I will say however, when I did understand them I really enjoyed the show I think they all sang amazingly. I think that all the actors did very well despite not being able to understand them sometimes, I really enjoyed the lighting design in specific moments, because it seemed like each god had their own specific lighting during their song to match what they represented. And I really liked how the fire came up from the stage, and when it tells us that the gods wept for her water trickled down the middle of the stage to represent the gods tears which I though was a great design element. Also, I liked the costumes, they were very creative and colorful. I think my favorite characters where the mom and dad because it reminded me of my own life being adopted, she wasn’t biologically related to them but they loved her anyway and just wanted the best for her, but my favorite god was Agwe who was the god of water, I really loved his song.
Overall, I wanted this to be a good experience but struggled to make it one. I think that I would want to see this show again somewhere else to compare the two, maybe I would like a different production of this show where I’m not really cold and I’m not distracted because I don’t know what’s happening and can’t understand what they are saying. Even though I’m still a little confused about what happened in the show if I were to see it again I think that I would probably understand it better just by putting the pieces of each show together. And I also heard that this production cut a lot of things so maybe that is contributing to the confusion. Again, I really like the idea of an outdoor theatre it makes for such a different experience because not only do you have LED lights but you have natural light until the sun goes down. It reminded me of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
Theatre in London U of A 