When Open Circle Theater company announced it would be reworking Jason Robert Brown’s Songs For A New World to revolve around the Iraq war, it was hard to squelch images of flag-waving, canons booming, and rewritten lyrics resembling “I’m not afraid of anything/be it religious extremists, guns or sand.” Fortunately, Open Circle’s take has much more sincerity, skill and imagination driving their interpretation, though ultimately, the work stands up better unadorned.

Songs, which recently was staged as a concert at the Strathmore, is a revue in which each song tells the story of a personal journey. It’s easy to see how some of them — “The Flagmaker”, for example, or “Over,” another Brown song not originally written for the show — would inspire thoughts of soldiers fighting, and the struggle which anyone touched by war endures. The problem is that forcing a narrative on the songs robs them of their interpretive value. Some pieces, such as the lovely “Hear My Song” and the hopeful “A New World”, are already of the inspirational Broadway ballad genre, and linking them with the troops nearly pushes them into the realm of the saccharine.