Songs for a New World
Written by Jason Robert Brown
Directed by David Walters
at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont (map)
thru March 30 | tickets: $25-$35 | more info
Check for half-price tickets
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This new world is well worth exploring
NightBlue Performing Arts presents
Songs for a New World
Review by Lawrence Bommer
Jason Robert Brown has a strong ear for the notes of driven desperation, including his song cycle The Last Five Years, which delivers a backwards chronicle of a wrenching breakup. Compiled from earlier concert or cabaret projects, Brown’s popular revue Songs for a New World works as a showcase for the singers as much as for the songs. As the title implies, these 16 songs depict moments of decision and transition, turning points that force the performers to create a context and a back story to earn the
Happily, director David Walters found the right quartet to pull so much off. Combining inexhaustible energy, they’ve also got the skill to put a passion in the present tense and to suit the style to the song: NightBlue Performing Arts Company’s revival is fully on top of Brown’s diverse musical menu of mostly major-key melodies—spiritual-to-gospel declarations, feel-good and feel-bad pop anthems, funky country, and propulsive pop. The video backdrop, by G. “Max” Maxin IV, finds apt images to illustrate everything from heartbreak to healing.
The theme is pretty much set by the group chorus “The River Won’t Flow,” a hymn of disappointment (that’s the darker side of “It Sucks to Be Me” from Avenue Q). Other assorted let-downs are anatomized in “Stars and the Moon,” sung by Kyrie Anderson with contagious regret for lost opportunities in love and life. In a different vein, Anderson has sardonic fun with the Kurt Weill-like “Surabaya Santa,” cunningly contrasted with a different holiday offering, “Christmas Lullaby,” plaintively delivered by Mary Margaret Roberts as a battered woman imagining a better life. In “I’m Not Afraid of Anything,” Roberts undercuts that proclamation with enough vulnerability to make us care.
The men run their gamut too. Curtis Bannister plunges deep into the spiritual morass of the pre-slave lament “On the Deck of a Spanish Sailing Ship, 1492” and in “King of the World” remembers from jail both what used to be and what might have been. (It’s hard to say which hurts more.) In the first act finale “The Steam Train,” Bannister leads the ensemble in a salute to basketball glory. Nathan Gardner brings humor and bite to the obsessive “She Cries,” as he plays a barfly who alienates everyone with the same self-incriminating confessional and pours out the ardor to Roberts in the heartfelt duo “I’d Give It All for You.”
The songs flow freely, the comedy revels and the revelations resonate in this two-hour tour-de-chanson–the only drawback being the tendency of the band to overwhelm the lyrics in the quieter moments. But this new world is well worth an exploration.
Rating: ★★★
Songs for a New World continues through March 30th at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont (map), with performances Thursdays-Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays 4pm and 8pm, Sundays 3pm. Tickets are $25-$35, and are available by phone (773-327-5252) or online through Stage773.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at NightBlueTheater.com. (Running time: 2 hours, includes an intermission)
Photos by Drew Peterson
artists
cast
Curtis Bannister (Man 1), Nathan Gardner (Man 2), Mary Margaret Roberts (Woman 1), Kyrie Anderson (Woman 2)
behind the scenes
David Walters (director), G. “Max” Maxin IV (set design, projections), Ashleigh Bowers (lighting design), Victoria Walker (costume design), Kelly Schaub, Liz Tanner (stage managers), Paul Packer (videography), Drew Peterson (photos)
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