Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown,
directed by Chris Abraham
Color & Light Productions, Young Centre, Toronto
November 21-December 16, 2006
Anyone who saw Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last 5 Years at CanStage in 2004 will want to see his first produced work, Songs for a New World (1995). Songs, a song-cycle for four singers on the theme of the hopes and disappointments in life, is filled with clever lyrics and draws on a wide range of styles from pop to jazz to classical.
There is no overarching story though Chris Abraham’s direction skillfully sets up resonances between the various numbers. The singers take on generalized personas--Thom Allison plays a stereotyped African-American male, Jason Knight a working-class white guy, Tracy Michailidis the “good” girl and Sharron Matthews the “bad” girl. Allison’s star shines the brightest with his beautifully expressive voice reveling in the joy of a gospel number or mining the pain of the blues. Michailidis’ warm, radiant tone soothes and charms, while Matthews gutsily delivers a variable series of complaints from the work’s best-known song, “Stars and the Moon,” to the comic lament of Mrs. Claus alone again at Christmas. Knight, allotted the least interesting songs, needs to give them a more emphatic delivery to make them work. Most annoying by far is the show’s ear-splitting amplification level that destroys any sense of intimacy or nuance the cast tries to create.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-11-30.
Photo: Top row: George Kozub, Noreen Waibel, Tom Jestadt, Thom Allison (Man 1), Sharron Matthews (Woman 2), Tim Fort (director); Bottom row: Jason Knight (Man 2), Jason Robert Brown and Tracy Michailidis (Woman 1). ©2000 JRB.
2006-11-30
Songs for a New World