The cast of Songs for a New World.
At a recent rehearsal at Picasso Parties in West Haven, the company of Fuse Theatre of CT was going through “The River Won’t Flow,” one of the songs from composer Jason Robert Brown’s musical theater piece Songs for a New World, which Fuse is preparing for a run at Bregamos Community Theater on Jan. 6, 7, 14, and 15. “The River Won’t Flow” centers on Brian Meltzer and Ty Scurry, who play panhandlers jostling for control of a street corner while trading sentiments about how their luck has run out. It’s a fun song about a serious subject, and the company wanted to make sure they got the balance of humor and heartache right.
With director Noah Golden guiding the conversation, offering ideas about everything from staging to general movement, the cast — Amber Emerson, Tiessa Hills, Susan Kulp, Brian Meltzer, Kelsey Mulligan, and Ty Scurry — got down to the business of filling in the details, trading notes and ideas about how to interact with one another on a character by character level to serve the message of the song. The scene took shape. Moments of locked-down coordination and moments staged to look like chaos but actually were not came into focus. The cast ran the number, ran it again, until they had it: a scene that delivered comedy without losing sight of the humanity inside the reality of the song and the situation.
“The River Won’t Flow” is emblematic of the pieces in Songs for a New World, written by Jason Robert Brown at the beginning of his career. It was the first show of his that made it to a stage, with an Off-Broadway run in 1995. An album of the songs was made and began circulating after the show’s run ended, and it developed a cult following that continued even as Brown hit it big with a subsequent musical, The Last Five Years, and won a Tony for Parade in 1999. The songs in Songs for a New World run the emotional gamut, by turns funny and sad, optimistic and despairing; they are set pieces individually, yet come together as a cohesive whole, even as they allow ample room for interpretation.
It thus made a lot of sense to be the next show for Fuse to take on as its fifth production since forming in 2019, for multiple reasons, according to director Golden. “This is a show that, personally, I’ve loved since high school and I’ve known for a long time,” Golden said. “It’s show that I’ve always wanted to do. It’s great music and universal stories, and I love how malleable it can be. It’s such an open canvas of a show,” so “it’s really fun on the creative side to figure out, because each song is a different story, what all those stories are and how you represent those on stage.”
Golden and the cast were also eager to take on Songs for the challenges that it presents. “The hardest thing about this show is making it a show and not a concert,” Golden said. “How do you create a framework, and create a narrative to connect everything and make it feel like it’s all part of one piece?” To address that question, Golden leaned into Fuse’s strengths and constraints as a small theater company, beginning with picking Songs for a New World in the first place. “We’re new, we’ve only been around a couple years, and we wanted a show that could be done really simply and without needing a lot of excess props and set pieces — something well within the budget of what we can do — and really showcasing the amazing talent” of the cast.
Fuse also doesn’t have a physical theater; “we’re a nomadic theater company,” Golden said. It performed its last production, All Together Now, at the Gateway Christian Fellowship church in West Haven. “But we want to be in different spaces,” Golden added.
Recent rehearsal at Bregamos.
Thus Bregamos. Golden grew up in the area and “had heard their name forever,” he said. “I knew a couple people who had done events there,” and contacted the theater. Bregamos agreed to take on Fuse, and Golden said he has loved working there.
“It’s a great space,” Golden continued, “small” and “intimate” — “and they have an upright piano there.” With the space Bregamos offers, rather than creating an elaborate umbrella concept for the songs — say, that the people in the show are all waiting in an airport somewhere — Golden headed toward “stripping everything down, telling the stories as honestly and creatively as we can, with the piano onstage,” and using the cast to create percussion when needed. “It’s been really fun figuring out what those moments are,” Golden said.
Developing the show — as the rehearsal for “The River Won’t Flow” suggested — has turned out to be a very collaborative process among director and cast. “This is my first time directing a full show,” said Golden, who has directed one-acts and been assistant director on larger productions in the area. “First of all, it has been a great experience,” but “one of the things I said to them at the beginning was that my job is to build the framework,” and let the cast develop many of the details from there.
“All of these performers have so much experience, knowledge, and talent,” Golden said; he wanted to “give them the space to do their work” and “collaborate on what the specifics are.” That process has turned out to be, in short, a lot of fun. Everyone in the cast, Golden said, “wants to work and have fun and play together, and they leave their egos at the door. We’re all just here to build something, which is also what this show is about.”
Fuse has even made space for a larger cast. Songs for a New World calls for four singers, but Fuse’s production has six people in it, a result of the strengths of the people who auditioned when Fuse put out its call for performers. “Six felt like we could expand it enough without breaking the seal of it being intimate and small.” Golden said. “It also allowed us to shake up who sings what a little bit, because we had to move a couple things around. Some songs are sung a little bit differently, by different people” than the original script calls for.
“If you’ve never seen Songs for a New World, then it’ll be a great experience and you’ll have a great time,” Golden said. For those that do know the show, “there’ll be some tweaks that make it feel fresh, make it feel like ours. I think that’s a real goal of Fuse’s — we’re a company that wants to do material that we can put our spin on. We’re not necessarily interested in doing big musicals that everyone does and everyone knows. There’s nothing wrong with doing shows that are big and popular. But there are more shows out there, and we like the idea of doing shows that more off the beaten path.”
So Songs mirrors the journey Fuse itself is on. “We meet people at this crossroads in their life, but it’s also about building a community,” Golden said. At the beginning of the show, “they’re disparate pieces, and by the end they’re all singing together.”
Fuse Theatre of CT’s production of Songs for a New World runs at Bregamos Community Theater, 491 Blatchley Ave., on Jan. 6, 7, 14, and 15. Visit Fuse’s website for tickets and more information.