21st Century Broadway: Aisha Jackson, Derek Klena, Javier Muñoz, Ali Stroker, vocalists; Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Steven Reinecke, conductor. March 4, 2025, Roy Thomson Hall. Repeats tonight; tickets here.
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra transported us to Broadway on Tuesday night.
Conducted by Steven Reineke, and focusing on gems from the past 25 years, the show, featuring four talented vocalists, made the familiar fun and the unfamiliar approachable.
On the one hand, there were selections from crowd-pleasers such as Wicked, Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, but, every now and then, we were hit with a lesser known song like “Love Who You Love,” from A Man of No Importance, whose presence in the program was later explained by Reineke in one of his characteristic asides to the audience: he took off his wedding ring and revealed that the title of the song is engraved inside of it.
One of the chief pleasures of attending Reineke’s shows in his Pop Series is seeing him in action, and in being privy to the way that the songs seem to emanate from the will of his passion and his clear vision, to hear of the stories and memories of a life lived through music.
He weaves his web before our eyes: the artist and the interpreter.
Act I
The first act, ushered in with the “Overture” to The Producers, began with Aisha Jackson, who, Reineke noted, was the first Black woman to portray Anna in the Broadway production of Frozen. She sang “All That Matters” from Finding Neverland, which took her awhile to warm up to, and “Fabulous, Baby” from Sister Act, where she suddenly appeared to inhabit the character of Deloris, expressing her attitude and confidence, entertaining the audience while shifting through various tones and moods with the ease of a seasoned performer.
After her, it was Javier Muñoz’s turn to demonstrate his range beyond his famed co-creations of In The Heights and Hamilton, but a lack of banter between songs, one of which was “Proud of Your Boy” from Aladdin, and a similar tone in performances left one wanting more.
This followed with Derek Klena, whose voice is as clean and sharp as his looks, a showman and a belter who, in one moment, can resume being Dmitry Sudayev from Anastasia and the next, Nick Healy from Jagged Little Pill singing “Perfect.”
The most exciting, dramatic moment arrived near the end of the song, when the orchestra stopped playing, Klena stopped singing, but Reineke’s baton remained in the air — suspending our attention for a moment too long — before the baton descended and Klena brought it home.
His audience exchanges mostly centered around the fact that he’d recently had a child and was increasingly finding himself drawn to songs about parenthood, like “You Matter to Me” from Waitress, for which the Tony-Award winner Ali Stroker — who, Reineke noted, was the first person in a wheelchair to be on Broadway — arrived on stage and broke our hearts.
“I hope someday, somebody wants to hold you for 20 minutes straight,” Stroker affectingly sang. “They don’t pull away, they don’t look at your face. And they don’t try to kiss you. All they do is wrap you up in their arms and hold on tight without an ounce of selfishness.”
It was Stroker’s words that resonated most deeply throughout the night when she talked about how music was the finest form of expression for her. “There are no stairs or inaccessible entrances with my voice,” she said, to the hollers of the audience, and she proved that statement to be astute, seamlessly facilitating the shift from her chest voice to a falsetto in the duet with Klena, for instance, or executing an almost growl that inflected her final notes, rendering her character’s plight with a guttural dimension.
She can transition from mother to diva in an instant.
Act II
The second act, rung in with the “Overture” to Curtains, gave each of the performers a chance to either redeem themselves, or re-affirm the sense of promise that they’d displayed.
Klena, whose storied relationship with “Goodbye” from Catch Me If You Can and whose personal attachment to “Dear Theodosia” from Hamilton failed to stir up new emotions, confined him to being a beacon of technical perfection. Muñoz, though, despite entering into “You Will Be Found” a beat too soon — and requiring Reineke to restart — shined as he resumed playing Alexander Hamilton and Usnavi de la Vega, conjuring up that same electric force that courses through those shows which were brought to life with the shadow of a windowpane cast over him.
The highlight of the show was Stroker and Jackson’s duet of “For Good” from Wicked, which depicts a tender moment between two friends, who, for better or for worse, have irrevocably changed each others lives. For a moment, as their voices weaved themselves together, I completely forgot about the consummate orchestra stirring behind them.
It was Jackson who received the most enthusiastic applause of the night for her performance of “I’m Here” from The Color Purple. “Yes, I’m beautiful,” she empathically sang, “And I’m here.” That simple yet expansive pronouncement, an affirmation and declaration of one’s existence, contained, within Jackson’s sincere utterance, that very sense of hope one is in search for when one turns to Broadway to learn how to live; that despite the despair that plagues the world, you can make something out of it that can expand your sense of yourself.
Save for an encore, the final song, “You Will Be Found” from Dear Evan Hansen, which featured an appearance by the Etobicoke School of Arts Music Theatre Ensemble, made the overall message of the night strikingly clear. “There’s a place where we don’t have to feel unknown,” they sang, “From across the silence your voice is heard.”
The rest of the 21st century is awaiting our ears.
By Nirris Nagendrarajah for LvT
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