Review: Joyously Rediscovering ‘Songs for a New World’

NEW YORK — There are plenty of musicals that welcome every bell and whistle that a director can throw at them — shows that, in the spareness of a concert performance, set spectators to dreaming about how gorgeous a full production might be.

Then there are rarer creatures that demand simplicity above all — shows that find their true best form in concert. Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World” is one of these, currently flourishing in a glorious Encores! Off-Center iteration, savvily directed by Kate Whoriskey at New York City Center. In desperate need of a restorative evening? Here’s one.

Brown was a floppy-haired 25-year-old when this revue had its off-Broadway premiere in 1995, with him at the onstage piano. A collection of stylistically varied songs that mean to be connected but aren’t, this is the show that added the cabaret favorite “Stars and the Moon” to the canon.

It was his first musical, three years before “Parade,” and it’s the work of a young composer-lyricist doing what young artists do: flex their muscles, imitate their elders, feel their way toward a voice of their own. These songs are, in effect, Brown’s baby pictures, and from the first piano notes of the buoyant opening number, “The New World,” this concert displays them in a clear and warming light.

The stellar cast — and a knockout performance by Mykal Kilgore, in the role Billy Porter played in the original production — is crucial to that. So is the understated approach of Whoriskey and the music director, Tom Murray. For all the richness of Brown’s new orchestrations, and the vitality of a five-person dance ensemble choreographed by Rennie Harris, this staging smartly errs on the side of less is more.

It does go wild in the Kurt Weill-esque comic number “Surabaya-Santa,” piling on the elf outfits (costumes are by Clint Ramos) and a big, beribboned gift box for Shoshana Bean to step out of. But at Wednesday night’s opening performance, this departure from restraint didn’t go so well. Playing a slinky Mrs. Claus, Bean was in constant, distracting peril of spilling out of the top of her sexy-Santa corset. Full points for valor, though: She powered through the song, adjusting her outfit only twice.

Otherwise, adornments are minimal, allowing the music and vocals to be the stars. Save for one dud, “The Flagmaker, 1775,” which cries out to be placed in the context of a larger narrative, the small stories Brown tells here stand on their own, song by song. Bean gets the winking numbers, going for subtlety in “Stars and the Moon” and big, broad humor in the passive-aggressive, echoes-of-Sondheim “Just One Step.”

Solea Pfeiffer, who is especially lovely in “Christmas Lullaby,” pairs with Colin Donnell in “I’d Give It All for You,” one of a few songs here that prefigure Brown’s “The Last Five Years.” Donnell gets some of the less interesting material, but he’s a wonderful straight man to Kilgore in their dueling duet, “The River Won’t Flow.”

Whoriskey has done some sensible problem-solving with her casting, which is multiracial, and with the dancers, using them partly to open up the show’s worldview. Their presence helps especially in two songs about black characters, “The Steam Train” and “King of the World,” by placing Kilgore, who sings both of them, in a social context rather than alone.

There’s nothing to be done, though, with the mini-monologues in “The Steam Train,” which intrude on a catchy, propulsive number with ghetto clichés. To his credit, the immensely winning Kilgore doesn’t try to sell or camouflage those bits — just puts them out there and gets back to what’s fun about the song. The narrator of “King of the World” is a prisoner, another cliché, but that’s less troublesome because Kilgore makes him so sympathetic.

The cast standout, he seals the deal toward the end of Act 2 with “Flying Home,” which in his hands is an almost-lullaby that becomes a spiritual that becomes a celebration.

Elsewhere, Kilgore delivers a boast that sounds like it’s coming straight from the strutting young composer, certain that he’ll prove himself.

“You don’t know me,” Brown’s lyric goes. “But you will.”

This show is how it started.

—