2011 Season – Masks

Songs for a New World
Music and Lyrics by

Jason Robert Brown

Directed by Mickey Lund

Musical Direction by

Anita O’Connor

Choreography by Jamie Miller

With Wendy Baird, Sandy Boldman, Peter Crews, Dean Davis, Dan Herrel, Sheri Kuznicki Owen

And Jeff Bailey on Bass Guitar, Stu Bailey on Saxophone, Corey Hewitt on Percussion, and Emily Sergo on Piano

Jason Robert Brown, composer-lyricist of the critical smash Parade, has had the whole theatre community talking about his blend of savvy showmanship and exciting contemporary sound for years, and it all started with this revue. Brown transports his audience from the deck of a 1492 Spanish sailing ship to a ledge 57 stories above Fifth Avenue to meet a startling array of characters ranging from a young man who has determined that basket-ball is his ticket out of the ghetto to a woman whose dream of marrying rich nabs her the man of her dreams and a soulless marriage. These are the stories and characters of today, the songs for a new world.

Director’s Notes

One of the characters in Songs for a New World says “I don’t want to philosophize. I just want to tell a story.” And that line describes Songs for a New World perfectly; in fact, it tells a whole collection of stories. It’s not a book musical – there is no over-arching plot and no consistent characters throughout the evening. In a 1998 review in St. Louis’ Riverfront Times, Mike Isaacson wrote, “Songs for a New World is that very rare beast: an abstract musical. There is no specific location other than the natural ambiguity of the human heart and mind.”

And yet, Songs for a New World has a very strong sense of unity about it, mainly because every song in the show is essentially about the same thing: those moments in life when everything seems perfect and then suddenly disaster strikes, in the form of the loss of a job, an unexpected pregnancy, the death of a loved one, the end of a marriage, imprisonment, even suicide.

But it’s even more about surviving those moments. It’s about the way we regroup and figure out how to survive in a new set of circumstances – a new world – even against seemingly overwhelming odds. These are songs about that new world, a world in which the definitions of family, distance, money, technology, the very nature of human contact is changing every day, a world in which the rules don’t apply as often as they do, a world in which the solutions our parents found don’t work for us, and a world in which today’s answers probably won’t apply tomorrow.

And in this new world, none of us is ever the only person to have ever gone through a particular crisis…and our salvation comes through community. By telling our stories and listening to others’ stories we find the strength to go on. And that’s not just the theme of this show. It’s the reason for theatre in general. From prehistoric people telling stories around the fire, to the biggest spectacle on Broadway, theatre is about telling stories, stories that unite us, that show us our commonality. We all find ourselves in new worlds from time to time, in situations where the rules we’ve always lived by no longer apply. We must all know that we can survive and even thrive there. Life is all about shared experiences, and about the fact that, as humans, we are all forced to go on new journeys, to venture into the unknown, into new worlds.