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>> Kwasi Songui serenades audiences with his heavenly vocal chords by AMY BARRATT Kwasi Songui looks like a younger, shorn Forest Whitaker and sounds approximately like a bass fiddle crossed with a gong. Recently, he played the villainous Red Knight in the new musical The Child at the Monument National. The moment Songui opened his mouth to sing, jaws all over the theatre collided noisily with knees. Reverberating in his barrel chest, his voice could have been singing an insurance company's annual report and we'd still have been enraptured. Songui, 25, became interested in theatre while doing a Communications degree at Concordia. Studying television production, he found himself very much in demand to do voice-overs for other people's projects. That was his first clue that some aspect of performance might be in his cards. He started singing just three years ago when, more or less on a whim, he went to a Miss Saigon audition. Before that, he claims, "I had no idea I could sing." "It was terrible. I didn't know anything about range or anything," he recalls. "But the people there were very encouraging. They told me to keep with it." He later joined the People's Gospel Choir, with whom he still sings, and has also performed in musicals with Lyric Theatre and McGill's Savoy Society.
In conversation, Songui is soft-spoken, even halting, and touchingly modest. He says that for a while he was pushing very hard to make it, but has pulled back in the last year in order to do some soul-searching. "I just want to make sure that this is what I should be doing," he says. But whether it's musical theatre or Shakespeare, opera or gospel, there's no doubt we'll be hearing more about Kwasi Songui in the year to come.
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The voice, arresting as it is, is not the only thing Songui has going for him. His commanding presence has also won him non-singing roles in several Repercussion Theatre productions. Call it charisma, call it star quality, Songui has the elusive "it" that keeps audiences riveted.