Word: edenic
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...time Alex Garland used it as the setting for his 1997 novel about young travelers in Thailand searching for the garden of Eden, Ko Pha-Ngan was already a legend on the Asian traveling circuit. Garland's The Beach has taken on a talismanic quality here: waterlogged paperbacks pass from bungalow to bungalow. It is the founding myth of this place: you come looking for paradise...
Children of Eden's cast brings together tremendous vocal power, and the show itself continually maintains a feeling of dialogue with the audience. Director Mimi Asnes returns the flexible Loeb Ex to the set-up of a traditional theater, one where the audience enters into the seating area with the stage directly in front. This is clearly the most effective use of the Loeb's space for this production, for Children of Eden begins as a story, and the audience is an extension of an onstage audience awaiting the tale of creation and the flood...
Giving a new spin to what are perhaps the world's most familiar stories is the play's explicit purpose, and yet the tension between Children of Eden as didactic educational tool and as entertainment is never fully resolved. The musical engages serious and more humorous numbers alike, ranging from Eve's "The spark of creation" where she questions the validity of her curiosity in Eden to the ironic "A ring of Stones" where Cain, Eve and Abel embrace Stonehenge. This unsettling contrast is no fault of the production staff or the actors but of Children of Eden itself...
Overall, however, Children of Eden more than recovers from these deficencies, largely due to the strength of the choreography and the staging. Eve's confrontation with the snake is brilliantly arranged. The snake begins as the tree of knowledge, then changes into a slithering six-person serpent. And the depiction of Noah and the Flood, in which the cast virtually becomes drops of water, is another of the first act's great achievements...
Nonetheless, the musical succesfully creates an overall atmosphere of wholesome fun. Sure, Noah's dove is obviously attached to a string, but this is all part of the musical mocking its own attempted seriousness. Musical numbers about the expulsion from Eden and time on the ark are bound at the very least to promote a bemused audience, and the cast does an admirable job with a show that lacks a cohesive theatrical intent. And so a trip to the Loeb Ex for a brush with the biblical is highly recommended. It should at least serve as a more entertaining form...