Khiyon Hursey’s name will be unfamiliar to many musical theatre followers, but the Berklee graduate, now based in Los Angeles and New York, is already accumulating a list of names of supporters and collaborators that is impressive: Alex Lacamoire, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Issa Rae and Stephen Schwarz are just some of the names he is able to drop in his self-effacing London debut.
On stage, Hursey is a slight, verging-on-the-edge-of-shyness figure. Like many composers, he may not have a voice as strong as the trained performers who get to sing his works, but nor does he have the air of showmanship that some cabaret-performing songwriters possess. In a nine-minute medley of songs from Hamilton (performed with Allyson Ava-Brown, who recently played Angelica Schuyler in the London production) he really does come across as a fan who’s won a competition to perform karaoke with a star.
Instead, Hursey seems content to let the songs take centre stage. Having worked as a music associate on Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, he was invited to join the latter’s writers Pasek and Paul to join the writing room for their movie Spirited, the 2022 Christmas musical starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. Renée Lamb gives a beautiful rendition of The View From Here, sung by Octavia Spencer in the film.
Lamb also delivers a beautiful rendition of Higher, a song Hursey wrote as part of a celebration of Wicked. The piece centres around a line from Defying Gravity – “everyone deserves the chance to fly” – and imagines how that would inspire the other citizens of Oz.
But both those pieces, while beautiful, are laden with Hursey’s need to blend with other composers’ styles (another such example being his self-described “twisted” version of Pure Imagination, the Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley standard). More important to understanding Hursey as a composer and as a person is his own voice.
That’s something that he freely admits took him a while to find – not least because he needed to work out how to meld the hip-hop passions of his youth into the musical theatre genre without sounding like Lin-Manuel Miranda.
What that voice sounds like comes through most effectively in pieces from a couple of pieces in development. Hursey is joined on stage by Julian Hornik, with whom he is collaborating on a musical centred around a gay couple’s first weekend together. Vocally, the pair are strikingly dissimilar, Hornik clearly cut from the “singing showman” composer cloth that eludes the evening’s star. Together, though, their work feels like something approaching genius. Fusing multiple styles, their songs from this unnamed musical could be smash pop hits in their own right, yet also seem to evoke characters we have yet to meet.
It all tends to put into the shade a collaboration highlighted earlier in the evening, with fellow LA composer Cheeyang Ng joining Hursey on stage. The pair share a couple of songs from Eastbound, their musical about two Chinese brothers who are separated early in life when one is adopted and taken to America. Ng’s music sticks much more closely to what has become the predominant American musical theatre style, but it feels like Hursey’s tastes lie in more radical directions.
Nowhere is that more apparent in the songs Hursey shares from his work in progress, Sean’s Story. Telling the story of a young black queer man in modern America, the exploration of intersectionality and response to a turbulent political landscape feels urgent and immediate. Joined by pop singer Lordin – aka &Juliet’s Nathan Lorainey-Dineen – Hursey’s numbers combine love, pain, fear and hope (“Cancer or police / I pray it’s not police”, Lordin sings). Hursey sings about the Black Lives Matter movement, with multitracked backing vocals providing wildly divergent answers to the questions he poses about the best way to protest.
Among all the examples of Hursey collaborating with others and adjusting his musical output to match, it feels like Sean’s Story shows his true voice: confident, urgent, impassioned – and breathtakingly unique.
Reviewed on 20 July 2023
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Impassioned writing
