Heart-wrenching ballads and snarky, comic numbers filled Kresge Auditorium last Friday and Saturday when the Curtain Callers performed Jason Robert Brown’s song cycle, “Songs for a New World.”
Curtain Callers was founded three years ago.
“I think there’s a lack of musical theater here and I think mostly people like it because it’s fun and exciting and such a sensory experience,” said student director Patrick Martin ’13. “So I feel like we’ve gotten good support from the student body.”
Martin helped charter Curtain Callers as a student organization and was very involved in the group’s first two main-stage musicals, “Hair” in the spring of 2011 and “The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee” in the fall of 2011.
The group produced its first musical review in the spring of 2012 and its third full-length production, “Urinetown,” this past fall.
In the musical theater world, “Songs for a New World” is known as a song cycle, a type of show in which there is no connecting dialogue between songs.
Although the songs are connected through the overarching theme of “decisions,” the plot line is fairly abstract.
Divided into two acts with a brief intermission, Curtain Callers’ production offered an impressive spectacle of vocal talent.After a selective audition process, Martin and several members of the production team selected a total cast of 18 student singers.
“When you do really vocally-demanding shows—which is what this was—you end up having to cast really talented people,” said Martin. “So they end up coming from a cappella groups, where they’ve already been through a filter; and through chamber choir, where they’ve already been through auditions to prove that they can read music and hold their pitch and sing with a piano.”
More than half of the 15 musical numbers in the show were solos, several were duets and three were large ensemble pieces. The individualized nature of each separate number allowed Curtain Callers to hold fewer group rehearsals and more individual rehearsals, permitting the group to advertise the show as a lower-commitment production.
Ultimately, according to Martin, the song-cycle model was an opportunity to include more singers than he would have been able to in some full-length musicals.
“The interest is definitely increasing, and I think that a lot of people that go see the shows think they’re really fun and exciting and they want to be a part of them,” said Martin.
“We did ‘Hair’ and ‘Spelling Bee’ with pretty much the same cast of people,” added Martin. “Then when I came back from abroad and went to ‘Urinetown’ rehearsals, I saw a ton of new faces.”
“Songs for a New World” is sophomore Golden Owens’ second Curtain Callers production.
“I’ve only ever been in one full musical, and I almost like reviews better because they have a lot of music, and I love to sing,” said Owens.
Owens, who performed the solo number “The Steam Train,” is also a member of Ursus Versus and the Bowdoin Chamber Choir.
Although Kresge Auditorium has been filled for many past Curtain Callers productions, the student body could still increase its openness to musical theater, according to Martin.
“Musical theater is sometimes a sticky wicket because people have weird mixed feelings about it,” said Martin. “I’ve always told people you can’t hate musical theater because it’s like hating…dessert or something. You can hate lemon bars or you can hate brownies but you probably don’t hate both of those things.”
“And my point in that is that seeing ‘Les Mis’ is so different from seeing the show that I did,” he added. “That’s why sometimes it’s a little difficult to advertise to people.”
Martin said he believes that, with more departmental and administrative recognition in the future, Curtain Callers could continue to grow and improve the quality of its productions and venues.
“We’ve proved ourselves over and over,” he said. “And I think that Student Activities has started to be more lenient and to trust us more with things. I like doing the shows in Kresge because it’s intimate, but it’s not the best venue by any means.”
“Something that we strive to do, especially in the future, is build relations with the theater department and build relations with Masque and Gown,” said Martin.