Mykal Kilgore and Colin Donnell in Song for a New World at the New York City Center. Picture: Joan Marcus
Songs for a New World, an Encores! Off-Center production, played New York City Center.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Call it a song cycle. Call it a revue. Whatever you call it, Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World contains some of the brainiest dramatic monologues ever set to music. They’re the kind of songs that give cabaret performances a climactic unexpected punch, the kind of songs that only the most confident talents would audition with.
And each of those songs was delivered with unrestrained affection and often gorgeous perfection as Encores! Off-Center, the summer offshoot of the New York City Center’s esteemed Encores! series, launched its current three-show season.
Encores! Off-Center is dedicated to spotlighting, for the most part, ground-breaking Off-Broadway shows of the past. After a workshop in Toronto, Songs for a New World premiered Off-Broadway in 1995 for a limited three and a half week run.
Brown and director Daisy Prince put together the book-less show – Brown’s first produced effort – with a number of songs he had previously written, all of them depicting people facing or dealing with a momentous time in their lives – an action, a decision or “an unexpected bend/And the road will end/In a new world”, as the cast sings in the opening number.
The show built its following with a cast album made after the original run’s closing, an album supported by Daisy Prince’s family (her father is Broadway titan Hal Prince), and numerous subsequent productions, concert and full-fledged, regionally and in New York.
As for Brown, he went on to create The Last Five Years, an Off-Broadway favourite, and provided scores for the Broadway shows Parade, Bridges of Madison County and Honeymoon in Vegas. His scores for Parade and Madison County won Tony Awards.
The Encores! Off-Center production of Songs for a New World followed the original run’s template with a cast of four singers, equally split gender-wise. The Encores two men were Colin Donnell and Mykal Kilgore, and the two women were Solea Pfeiffer and Shoshana Bean. Each of them was given multiple opportunities to show off their vocal prowess and affinity for Brown’s material, while also harmonising together for impressive choral work.
Stylish staging by director Kate Whoriskey provided each song with its own ambience, with various scenic effects by Donyale Werle, lit by Mark Barton, and the occasional change in Clint Ramos’s costumes.
The production was further enriched with a crew of five dancers, choreographed by hip-hop master Rennie Harris. New orchestrations for the nine-piece band, under music director Tom Murray and situated onstage sometimes distanced by a scrim, were by the composer-lyricist himself.
Sixteen titles mae up the song list, reflecting a wide swath of genres, from samplings of gospel, rhythm and blues, jazz and rock, to comic revue and show tune flavours. Brown’s lyrics are highly emotive, heightened by the propulsive rhythms and dramatic effects that mark much of his accompaniments.
The words have a contemporary pungency, even as a couple of them specifically refer to the past. ‘On the Deck of a Spanish Sailing Ship, 1492’ has the ship’s captain praying and worrying about the fates of his crew and refugee passengers as they brave a stormy sea carrying them to an unexplored country, one of the new worlds referenced in the show’s title.
The number was led by Kilgore with gospel fervour, a fervour that this magnetic dervish of a performer sustained in such numbers as ‘The Steam Train’, laying out the against-the-odds aspirations of a ghetto kid.
Then, late in the show, his energy was revved up even more with the soaring gospel-tinged requiem ‘Flying Home’, home, in this case, being Heaven. It was a number that won Kilgore and the dancers behind him a prolonged standing ovation at the performance attended.
Equally impressive – if not as explosive – was the clarity of Donnell’s storytelling, taking on a variety of not-so-admirable characters with empathy. In ‘King of the World’, he was a once powerful figure now in prison bemoaning his fate with a familiar cry about the injustice of it all. “Why am I sitting in this cell?/I was not challenging the system/I was working for the people/I just wanted to be better.”
In ‘The World Was Dancing’, he was a scholarship student at an eminent university, so subtly but deeply affected by his father’s failure in business that he leaves both the school and his campus fiancée behind without even saying goodbye.
Donnell also had fun duelling attitude with Kilgore in ‘The River Won’t Flow’, in which the two guys bemoaned in lively R&B fashion the fact that the river of money doesn’t flow in their direction.
Bean delivered more generous helpings of comedy in two big character numbers dissecting neglected wives. In ‘Just One Step’ she was the middle-age mate of a typically unfaithful husband (why are they almost always named Murray?), trying to get hubby’s attention by standing on a ledge outside of her apartment and threatening suicide.
In ‘Surabaya-Santa’, a take-off on Brecht-Weill’s ‘Surabaya-Johnny’, she was Mrs. Claus tired of spending Christmas Eves alone and ready to escape the North Pole. Indeed, they are funny numbers but they have their dark underpinnings.
In a change of tone, Bean also found both the irony and pathos in the cabaret perennial ‘Stars and the Moon’: a woman tells how she rejected poor but poetic suitors for a wealthy man who gave her all the material things but, as she sadly realises: “I’ll never have the moon.”
Then, there was more pathos with strength in ‘The Flagmaker, 1775’, with Bean as a woman of Revolutionary America, sewing the new country’s new flag, while her son and husband are away fighting the war.
Tender moments were also rendered by Pfeiffer, as in ‘Christmas Lullaby’, where a pregnant woman has reveries of the Virgin Mary, and in ‘I’d Give It All for You’, a duet with Donnell in which two former lovers regret their splitting.
Some commentary on the show sees the numbers as tying together in some sort of narrative. For example, the fellow being carted up to heaven in ‘Flying Home’ could be the son or husband of the flagmaker. However, such connections can be pretty tenuous and unnecessary. The songs stand proficiently alone – as Brown has said, he intended them to function as musical short stories.
On the debit side, each of the songs also aims so pointedly at the mind or heart and hits the mark with such pinpoint accuracy that you may indeed feel a little punch drunk or battered by the time the finale rolls around.
A few inconsequential interludes, if Brown were so willing, might well lighten the proceedings, relieve it a bit of that creeping but ever so rising hint of – dare I say it? – self-importance. But then again, it’s hardly a tragedy to be in the presence of so much – maybe even too much – of a good thing.
And certainly, the five performances of Songs for a New World set a high bar for the rest of the Encores! Off-Center season. The two shows that will be facing the challenge are Gone Missing, from 2003, and Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, from 1971
Gone Missing will play just two performances on 11 and 12 July. The devised show from The Civilians theatre company is based on interviews company members did with people about objects they lost and how they dealt with loss. It features a score by Michael Friedman, who before his untimely death last year at age 41 from HIV/AIDS complications was serving as Off-Center’s 2017 artistic director.
Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope represents a deviation from Off-Center’s Off-Broadway indoctrination. After initial stagings in Washington and Philadelphia, the revue, with a score by Micki Grant and focusing on race politics and the need for change, the show had its New York premiere on Broadway, where it ran for 1,065 performances. However, it certainly meets the prerequisite for ground-breaking. It was conceived and directed by Vinnette Carroll, who with this show became the first African-American woman to direct on Broadway.
Doing the directing – and choreography – honours this time around will be tap dance phenomenon Savion Glover, whose mother and aunts, as Off-Center happily points out, toured with the show in the 1970s. Its five Off-Center performances run 25-28 July.
Ron Cohen
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