Music from the original production ...
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Aug. 6 - 21, 2010
Marian Theatre

Aug. 27 – Sept. 12, 2010
Solvang Festival Theater

With a live band on stage. 

Songs for a New World…thoughts:

Songs for a New World is more than a show it is an experience.  It is completely sung through.  It’s all music all the time, and it is all LIVE!  We have four amazing actors on stage with a live band.  There is so much energy coming off the stage you can literally feel it!

The actors and the musicians take the audience on a journey that seamlessly bounces back and forth through time on a multi layered set.  The actors move among the musicians and on platforms that actually allow the performers to be among the audience.

Songs for a New World is about life changing and earth shattering discovery - moments of discovery that cannot be expressed with mere words; they must be sung. 

Songs shows the struggle between Fear and Faith, and it asks the question, “In the moment of profound discovery what do you do?” 

Songs takes two men and two women on a journey.  They journey together; sometimes they lead, sometimes they follow.  They journey with friends, family, lovers….  They look for allies, confidants, mentors…, and in doing so they discover they are worthy – worthy to love, worthy to risk, worthy to fail, worthy of success, worthy of trust….  They let go of their agenda and find authenticity. 

Songs asks its four actors to say yes - to leap into the unknown, to fight their fears, and to question their assumptions.

The four reach out to the audience looking for allies, they connect to the audience as confidants, and they ask the audience for guidance.   Each show there is a brand new audience; the four have new travelers every night, which means new connections, new discovery…a new world.

Erik

It’s all about the music in this gorgeous song cycle from Jason Robert Brown, one of the rising voices of the musical theater. Each song transports us through different stories, humorous and moving, of our American identity and experience – our community and isolation, our desire for the immaterial in a material world, and the moments of decision that define our journey. With a magic that only great music can provide, these Songs sweep us away into the moments we stand our ground, break our silence, make a bargain and find our way home.

About the play –
Songs for a New World first hit the stage in an off-Broadway production at the WPA Theatre in NYC in 1995. Pushing the boundary between musical and song cycle, this piece is connected more by theme than narrative. Traditionally a song cycle is a group of songs that are by the same composer or the same lyricist and are designed to be performed as a whole. They often rely on narrative or the creation of a persona that is common to the songs. Song cycles began with Ludwig von Beethoven in 1816, but are certainly a feature of contemporary composition in both the symphonic and pop realms. Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is a classic example.

In this case, as creator Jason Robert Brown observed, “It’s about one moment. It’s about hitting the wall and having to make a choice, or take a stand, or turn around and go back.” While this was Brown’s first produced show, it reflects a broad range of musical styles and genres including pop, gospel, jazz, and classical music. It also contains a range of both fictional and historical characters including Christopher Columbus and Mrs. Santa Claus. The piece has also been described as “a journey of discovery.” As the opening song claims, we are to explore “A new world shattering the silence/ A new world I’m afraid to see.”

Born of a workshop in Toronto, then produced off-Broadway and then studio-recorded the following year, this work has gone on to great acclaim through the regional theaters of America. Its success also led to Brown’s first major Broadway assignment, writing the score for the musical Parade which opened in New York after a strong showing in LA. In a very complimentary review of the work, CurtainsUp stated “of the new young composers working in today’s musical theater, Brown is the one who has not sacrificed melody to modernity. His closest resemblance, to Sondheim, is in his ability to write smart story-telling lyrics that are witty and at times even poetic.” His music is extremely rhythmically challenging and relies on complex and unconventional harmonies.

About the production –
Nelson Mandela asserted that “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” For director Erik Stein, Songs for a New World is about life-changing and earth-shattering discovery; these are moments of discovery that cannot be expressed with mere words, they must be sung. This piece shows the struggle between fear and faith, and it asks the question, “In the moment of profound discovery what do you do?” As a result of that questioning, it suggests that the way to literally make a new world is through self-discovery. When we change ourselves we change the world. Stein offers as his mantra for the show, an adaptation of a quotation from Joseph Campbell; “we must let go of the life we have planned, so as to [discover] the one that is waiting for us.” Songs for a New World asks its four participants to say yes – to leap into the unknown, to fight their fears, and to question their assumptions.

To serve this vision of a “new world,” Stein and his team have created various means to transform the spacial environment, the canvas of the stage. They have considered how to visually reflect moments of decision, elements of choice, and the explorations of tempo necessitated by the structure and drive of the piece. And they have also integrated an on-stage band. This production features live musical performance under the direction of Jordan Richardson.

The design also allows for significant interaction with the audience since, as Stein indicates, “the four reach out to the audience looking for allies. They connect to the audiences as confidants. And they ask the audience for guidance.” To be a citizen of a new world is to acknowledge our responsibility to, and with, others. “So the four players have new travelers every night; that means each performance offers new connections, new discoveries, and a new world.” The path to this awareness is from deconstruction to reconstruction, from discovery to re-invention, and from fear into faith. To quote Mandela again, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

About the author –
Born in Ossining, New York in 1970, Jason Robert Brown is a composer and lyricist noted for fusing pop-rock stylings with witty and complex theatrical lyrics. The Philadelphia Inquirer asserted that he was “one of Broadway’s smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim.” After a suburban childhood spent outside NYC, Brown studied at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, one of the top music academies in the US. Returning to NYC, he began to work as an accompanist and arranger, moving on to conducting and musical direction. His first break came with Songs for a New World in 1995. While the production had a limited run, “Stars and the Moon” has become a cabaret standard and through his director, Daisy Prince, he met the legendary Broadway producer /director Hal Prince.

Prince hired Brown to write songs for Parade and the show went on to win Brown a Tony for Best Original Musical Score 1999. Brown has gone on to write a number of compositions for other shows and had his Chanukah Suite premiere with the Los Angeles Master Chorale. He released a solo performance album in 2005, and his most recent musical work, 13, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum and moved to Broadway for 2008-9. He is also a teacher of musical theater performance and composition at USC.
Brown is married to composer Georgia Stitt with whom he has two daughters.