Now I can’t imagine how the show would work without it: it makes the piece more than a collection of songs – it becomes a prayer: hear my song. well, it made the show kind of make sense. There was this guy onstage playing the piano, and it so happened he wrote all the songs, and at the end of the show, he sang, “Listen to the song that I sing,” and. At first, I was really resistant to the idea – I thought it was kind of cheap and distracting – but then I realized it was almost inevitable. and I ended up singing it every night of the run. I was never sure what to do with the last line of Hear My Song – who was most appropriate to sing it? Daisy suggested I sing it myself until I could make a decision. As he sang, “I am ready, Father, to fly!” the flag rose into the heavens. While Jessica stayed in front of the flag, Ty stepped to the front of the stage to sing Flying Home – they were connected across time to each other. A massive American flag began eerily descending from the ceiling, and Jessica became The Flagmaker, 1775. A grate in the stage began glowing, and Ty sang King Of The World trapped in a chair above the grate. The first sound in the second act was Andrea’s voice, coming from an old radio in The World Was Dancing. (As she sang, a crowd assembled below her – Brooks was thoughtful enough to share his popcorn.) In the middle of The Steam Train, Ty turned around and the scrim magically showed a city shining off in the distance. Then, for Just One Step, the sail fell to the ground, revealing Jessica up on a ledge, fifty-seven floors above Fifth Avenue. As the cast finished the first song, Ty pulled a piece of white fabric out of the ground, and it flew toward the ceiling and became a sail – magically we were On The Deck Of A Spanish Sailing Ship, 1492. The set for Songs For A New World looked like a combination of the deck of a ship and a playground – a vast wooden space with platforms and stairs and ropes, and hidden treasures. A year later, we opened at the WPA Theatre, with four brilliant performers, a five-piece band, and an unbelievably talented group of designers finally bringing my songs to life. The moment you think you know where you stand, the things that you’re sure of slip from your hand, and you’re suddenly a stranger in some completely different land. I hadn’t realized that that was what it was about, but I sat down at the piano in the rehearsal room at 1:30 in the morning, and suddenly I knew. It’s about hitting the wall and having to make a choice, or take a stand, or turn around and go back. And there we were, doing a workshop in Toronto, and we needed an opening number to say what this show had turned into, what Songs For A New World was really about. We had discarded piles of songs – I don’t know why they weren’t right, but I know they weren’t – and new songs had been written to replace them. But the show had become more than that – it was starting to take a strange new shape, and Daisy and I were powerless to control it: somehow, songs that had always been perfect on their own seemed awkward in context songs that had been written years and miles apart seemed to make sense together words and melodies that came from different times and places all seemed to add up to one statement. Now, as far as we were concerned, Songs for a New World was still just going to be a collection of my cabaret and theatre songs, a way to introduce my writing to the world. So we started working, and working, and working, and eventually, Daisy and I had been working on Songs For A New World for three years, and we still didn’t have an opening number. She asked me to write an opening number to say what the show was going to be about. I had never seen Daisy direct so much as traffic – there are just times when my intuitions are really strong, and if I’m lucky, I pay attention: in this case, I was lucky, and Daisy said it sounded like fun. Then I met Daisy Prince at a piano bar where I was working, and she came to see the show, and she seemed to really like it, and so out of nowhere, I asked her if she wanted to direct it. But some things take on a life of their own, and I couldn’t stop working on this material. So I decided I would just take a bunch of songs I had written for various abandoned pieces and put them up at a cabaret, and I could find collaborators from there. The only problem was that I didn’t really know anybody in New York other than the delivery guy from the Chinese restaurant, and I didn’t think he would be such a great collaborator, since he couldn’t even give me the right change. I was twenty years old when I got to New York City, and I was determined to write my big Broadway musical. Oops, looks like your browser doesn't support HTML 5 audio.
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