![]() In the Paper Mill production, Man 1 is played with great charisma by Roman Banks. He does have “Flying Home” at the end, but it’s a little too late to have a Black deus ex machina absolve the pain. The characters in Man 1’s songs are constantly beaten down by their circumstances. In “King of the World”, he’s imprisoned for an unspecified crime. I never had me no phone,” and, “This corner is where I was born to be.” In “The Steam Train” he says he wants to be a basketball player because everyone from his school is either in jail, dead, or selling donuts on 125th Street. In “The River Won’t Flow” he says, “I never had me no house. Man 1’s songs are plagued with Black stereotypes. In “The World Was Dancing” he ignores some substantial problems with his parents because he’s more concerned with whatever woman he is dating (and/or cheating on) at Princeton. His first solo song, “She Cries”, is a (maybe intentionally) misogynistic rant about how you have to run away from a crying woman or she’ll get you to engage with her feelings. As more time passes and the world changes, Man 2 becomes more and more of an asshole. Man 1 is typically cast with a Black tenor (Billy Porter, Mykal Kilgore in the recent Encores! production) and Man 2 is typically cast with a white baritone (Brooks Ashmanskas, Colin Donnell at Encores!). The songs for Man 1 and Man 2 are where the show’s cracks are spreading. When she reaches the climactic key change, it’s quite moving. It is a gentle song on the surface, but Pinero is able to mine its depths for the pathos underneath. Pinero seems a little nervous on her first solo song, “I’m Not Afraid of Anything” and her pitch and timing wavers, but her “Christmas Lullaby” in the second act is lovely. Pinero sounds wonderful on the opening, “The New World”, and each time she is called on to interstitially reprise the song. In the Woman 1 role, Mia Pinero opened the show with her crystal clear tone, causing someone behind me to go “What a voice!” after she’d only sung two notes and was in the middle of a phrase. The show doesn’t really call for dancing. There are a lot of sharp pops on the beat, a lot of actors striking poses and moving hips when the groove kicks in. The choreography by Kenny Ingram feels a little like the production doesn’t trust the songs to be interesting on their own. These moments distract from the simple truth of the song and pull our eyes away from the actor. At other times, the lighting feels more like a cruise ship spectacular, moving around too much and shooting out at the audience. The lighting by Charlie Morrison is, at times, beautiful in its intention and captivating in its angular shaping of the empty space around an actor. The production can get a little busy, though. Having seen productions that don’t get that, it was a relief that Hoebee did not try to impose a overarching narrative. Generally billed as “Man 1”, “Woman 1”, etc., they are here listed by the actor’s name, further highlighting that, yes, they are the same actor, but no, they are not the same character singing every song. He doesn’t try to connect the songs to each other (they aren’t related!) and he doesn’t try to define “characters” outside of the individual numbers (they are new people in every song!). Hoebee’s production mostly understands this. If you get a great singing actor to bring them to life, you can almost leave them alone. There is so much packed into them lyrically, musically, and dramatically. That’s the beauty of Brown’s score–the songs do most of the work. ![]() ![]() ![]() It makes a lot of sense: there are only four people in the cast, it’s mostly solos, it doesn’t require a lot of set. Paper Mill Playhouse has revived Songs for a New World as its opening production following more than a year shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. It’s tough, then, for me to admit that the show is starting to feel out of step with the times. For people, admittedly myself included, who revere Brown’s writing, it is the urtext of his talent. It’s the jumping-off point for Brown’s career it features his most well-known song (“Stars and the Moon”) and later led to Parade, his collaboration with Daisy’s father, Harold Prince. The resulting cast recording, though, reached me–in high school in California–several years later. It ran for three and half weeks in an off-Broadway theatre, so not a lot of people got to be there in person. Jason Robert Brown was all of twenty-five when Daisy Prince encouraged him to shape his individual songs into a cycle and put it on stage with a quartet of rising singers: Brooks Ashmanskas, Andréa Burns, Jessica Molaskey, and Billy Porter. Most of the people I know experienced Songs for a New World for the first time through its untouchable original cast recording. “Songs for a New World” at Paper Mill Playhouse (Photo: Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade) ![]()
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