The problem with an island is that it is surrounded by water, and the only way to get off is to find a boat.

There were no boats available Friday night as Skylight Music Theatre opened a lackluster production of "Once On This Island," the multiple Tony Award nominee known for its tender love story and exuberant island passions.

The hopes for this show ran high, but somehow this production managed to suck all the air out of this balloon and leave me wondering what was supposed to be so great about this play.

Certainly there was a lot of street cred going into the thing. It ran for 469 performances on Broadway and was nominated for nine Tonys in 1991.

The story seemed to hold a lot of promise as well. There's a fictitious island in the Caribbean with two distinct halves: one with peasants, poor and black but gloriously guided by a series of gods, and the other half made up of light colored blacks who have French blood and who are rich and cloistered. Nary the twain shall meet, right?

No sir. A young man from the rich side of the island is involved in a car accident while driving through the peasant side of the island. His life is saved by a young woman who nurtures him back to health. They fall in love with each other, much to the disquietude of both sides.

It looks, however, as if love will conquer all until the young man reveals to the young woman that he has been promised to another woman – a rich woman, a woman like him. Unhappy broken heart, here we come.

There was one happy part for me though: The play ended.

It’s problematic to figure out why a show with such a pedigree would lay such an egg in this production. Like most complex problems, there is no single answer. Rather, a combination of mediocrities managed to turn something that was supposed to be tender and vibrant into something that resembled a low-rated Telenovela soap opera.

The start of the difficulty was the cast of actors and singers. They tried, but they were burdened by misdemeanors from the music director Shari Rhoads and the co-choreographers, Lee Palmer and Bill Theisen, who also was the stage director.

None of the musical numbers contain even a shred of believability. So many of the songs seemed like anthems to gods or love or faith or loyalty or family, and each time one of these came along, the singer tried like hell to show us that this song had a vitally important message that we should pay close attention to. Someone needed to tell them to let the song breathe and don’t try to fool people into belief. Let the song do it all by itself.

The choreography was almost juvenile. I’m not a dancer, but I can tell when something on stage is creating magic. This looked almost like a Fred Astaire class in the third week of a 10-week course.

Last season Skylight mounted "In the Heights," a rambunctious musical set in a Dominican-African enclave in New York. The production captured the tempo and rhythm of the community and was full of joy and wonder.

This island community had none of the kind of joy and freedom you might expect from an island in the Caribbean where dance and music were the outlets for poverty and discrimination.

But nobody seemed to be having any genuine fun onstage. This was kind of like the senior class play when the drama teacher hollers ,"OK everyone; now look sad."

I really wanted this play to be great. I love Skylight and have tremendous respect for what they do, show after show after show. I wanted this one to carry me along to exciting and wondrous places. I hoped that talented people would step up and make my world sing for 90 minutes.

Instead, I walked away feeling sad that somewhere along the line everyone missed what should be special about this play.

Rather than feeling great, I felt lonely, stuck on an island with no boat in sight.

"Once On This Island" runs through Feb. 22 and information on tickets and showtimes is available here.