★★★☆☆ A theatrical song cycle delivering wonderful singing but less of the emotion.

Hayes Theatre Co, Sydney
August 13, 2016

Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World is something of an oddity. Written in 1995 when he was just 25, it was his first produced show, signalling the arrival of a talented composer/lyricist when it had a short run off-Broadway. Brown went on to write the musicals Parade, The Last Five Years and The Bridges of Madison County, winning Tony Awards for the scores of Parade in 1999 and Madison County in 2014. However, Songs for a New World is not a musical as such but a theatrical song cycle.

There is no narrative. Instead it features 16 songs, each telling a self-contained story, with New York across the ages as the backdrop. The four performers – simply known as Woman 1 and 2, and Man 1 and 2 – play a series of unnamed, unrelated characters. What connects them is a loose theme about pivotal moments in life to do with love, unhappiness and ambition, leading to choices and new beginnings. And so we have, among others, the captain of a Spanish ship en route to a new...