Songs For a New World

Musical theatre requires good voices, and there’s no shortage of them in Harvest Rain’s Songs for a New World. Four of Brisbane’s top singers, Luke Kennedy, Naomi Price, Angela Harding and Luke Venables, together with a vocal ensemble of 12, bring Jason Robert Brown’s contemporary music theatre song cycle to life. Kennedy, who has an amazing voice which seems to be in better shape since his recent Ten Tenors tour, scored with “The Flagmaker, 1775” and “King of the World,” Price delivered the laughs on the Brecht/Weill parody “Surabaya Santa” and the cabaret favorite “Stars and the Moon,” and Harding sang the heart out of “I’m Not Afraid of Anything.” If Venables performance was a little less than his co-stars, it was because his vocals on the first night were pitchy. Tim O’Connor’s production was full of symbolism (the set was a wall of different sized boxes), and his use of an ensemble, whilst they added to the vocal strength, at times shifted focus from the principals. Peter Laughton’s sound design was muddy, which meant lyrics were frequently lost. The work itself is not as good as the same composer’s The Last Five Years, which Kennedy and Price performed brilliantly at the same venue in 2007, but this is a worthy collection of story songs which look at people who are at a crossroads in their life.
Peter Pinne