All articles from Jason Robert Brown
I'll tell you what I hear.
I hear my band in college, with a big Earth, Wind & Fire-style horn section, playing a riff that I eventually turned into "The River Won't Flow." 1988, I was e…
I have played a few concerts in my life where I felt something shift, like every concert afterward would be informed by what had happened onstage that night. The general structure of my conc…
I got asked if I would come watch a run-through of a new musical because the producers were considering replacing the musical director and wondered if I would be open to taking over. The cat…
The world I travel in is filled with gay men and women, trans people, and folks who inhabit basically every millimeter of the gender-and-sexuality spectrum. They are my collaborators, my fr…
It seems unlikely, I know, but I lived in Los Angeles for almost a decade and I really loved it, and one of the things I loved was my relationship with some of the local theater companies. …
I've spent a lot of time in Las Vegas over the years " I was the music supervisor for six industrial shows for State Farm Insurance that played at the Thomas & Mack Arena " and I actuall…
Sometimes I ask what it is that the world needs from me, how can I be of service to this complicated and conflicted planet, and sometimes the answer comes with bracing clarity. On June 14, I…
SCOTT BAKULA, HANNAH CRUZ, BEN LEVI ROSSÂ AND THE ORIGINAL CAST AND ORCHESTRA OF THE CONNECTOR TO REUNITE FOR A ONE-NIGHT ONLYÂ CONCERT BENEFITTING THE COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS
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Once I finish a show, it stays finished! Done! Close the book, put it away, here the Maestro laid down his pen.
Except sometimes.
I mean, there's always one line that I never... Read more..
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When I did the first concert in my SubCulture residency in December 2014, I knew I was starting a new phase in my musical life, but I didn't realize that I was actually closing a chapter as …
I had been warned that the crowd at the early show was likely to be kind of subdued. Monday night in Pittsburgh, mostly subscribers, older folks, nothing bad but good to know in advance. To …
Let's start this story by referring to the picture below this paragraph. That video still represents the real beginning of my career in the New York theater. See that dark-haired kid on the …
I don't know about how it works in your house, but in our little corner of show business, the first Tuesday of September feels like someone shot a starter pistol in Times Square and suddenly…
Analyzing the opening number, "The Whole World Changed," featuring Yehudi Menuhin, Philip Glass, cameos from two of my previous scores, our next Commander-in-Chief cast in resin, a Yeti with…
Last week, I started a new video series called "The Deep Dive," where I'm delve into the writing process of The Connector in obsessive, microscopic detail. Here's Issue #1, where I spend ab…
For over fifty years, the 92nd St. Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan has hosted virtually every luminary of the musical theater through its Lyrics and Lyricists series. I am so proud to…
Often in these pages I have spoken about seeing Closer Than Ever at the Cherry Lane Theater in 1989 and the powerful effect it had on me. Among the many repercussions of that evening was my …
Some things involving Hal Prince really only make sense in the context of Hal Prince, so I won't take up your time attempting to explain why we did our first production of Prince of Broadway…
The world has changed a lot since my last concert in London, in 2019, and I've changed a lot with it. For reasons both obvious and not, I've gone from doing 20 to 30 concerts a year to doing…
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The post TWO MORE WEEKS OF THE CONNECTOR (and other news) appeared first on Jason Robert Brown.
What, you may ask, is "popular demand"? "Popular demand" is when we've been selling so many tickets for The Connector in its world pr... Read more..
The post "THE CONNECTOR" EXTENDS TO MARCH…
Sometimes you get so excited about the fact that tickets are on sale for your new show that you turn on a camera and talk about it for thirteen minutes.
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The post LAUNCHING "THE …
It's been 12 years since my last trip to Indianapolis and things have sure changed. The Cabaret's new purpose-built venue is a wonder, a great room for making and listening to music, with a …
Georgia and I were honored with this year's Inspire Award by the folks at the Foundation for New American Musicals, and we decided to bring some friends along to help us celebrate (and sing …
So sometimes what happens is you hear this song on the Internet, sung by this very young writer, and you think, "Wow, she's pretty amazing," so you follow her on Twitter (back when you used …
ImprovisationI L... Read more..
The post SET LIST: MUSIC WITH THE DIGIFIDDLER, BARRINGTON STAGE COMPANY, PITTSFIELD MA, 8/31-9/1/23 appeared first on Jason Robert Brown.
Pittsfield, MA " August 31 & September 1, I'm on the stage at Mr. Finn's Cabaret at Barrington Stage Company, playing every song I've ever written, in chronological order! I'll be sharin…
It's surely one of the less expected things on my résumé, but for a brief period of time in 2003, I put on a cowboy hat and boots every night and led the band of the Broadway musical, Urba…
Real big news: As of today, right now, this very instant, you can stream and/or download the 2023 Broadway cast album of PARADE! Produced by myself and Jeffrey Lesser, with B... Read more..
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On February 21, 2023, the night of the first preview of the new Broadway production of Parade (a musical about the Leo Frank case that premiered in 1998), audience members waiting to enter t…
A gorgeous autumnal Sunday in suburban New Jersey with my magnificent band and truly one of the most amazing singers in the world. Not only did we get to play extended versions of some of ou…
An amazing weekend with the folks at Red Mountain Theater in Birmingham AL. I'm always surprised that I have this long, rich relationship with a theater in the Deep South, but Keith Cromwell…
To my utter astonishment, as of right now, you can turn on Netflix and see the film adaptation of my musical 13! Directed by Tamra Davis, produced by Neil Meron, with a screenplay by Robert …
Shoshana Bean and I have been yodeling, complaining, cracking each other up and messing up lyrics together for about fifteen years now. We sang together at a wedding, we sang together at a b…
Nineteen years after I started writing 13 with Dan Elish, I have the flabbergasting joy of presenting to you… the trailer for the Netflix motion picture "13: The Musical," which begins air…
When Mr. Saturday Night opened on April 29 at the Nederlander, it marked the first time I've had a new full score on Broadway since Honeymoon In Vegas closed in 2015. Certainly there's been …
One of my kids' camp counselors needed to interview a composer for her school, so I got volunteered. I ended up kind of liking what I had to say, so I thought I'd post it here in case it giv…
Not that long ago, I did 30 to 40 concerts a year, traveling all over the country, racking up frequent flier miles and staying in weird hotels and eating a lot of late dinners by myself. Thi…
*|MC_PREVIEW_TEXT|* THE JRB HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 2021 It's holiday time! Â Let's fling our masks aside with joyous abandon and celebrate (as long as you've got a second mask on underneath). …
Four hundred and seventy-four days. I did a show in Los Angeles on March 9, 2020, and I didn't perform in front of a live audience again for four hundred and seventy-four days. I was in Toro…
This morning " nineteen years after I first wrote down a list of characters including "Evan Goldman" and "Archie" and "Patrice"; eighteen years after Dan Elish and I started writing a show a…
Over the next several months, I'm going to be able to tell you lots of things about the movie of "13" that we're currently rehearsing in Toronto. I'll be able to tell you what songs we kept …
The night that New York City went into lockdown, March 16, was to have been the 58th concert in my monthly residency at SubCulture, a series that has given me so much joy and fostered so muc…
I am overjoyed to announce the release of COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE, the remixed and remastered soundtrack of our Virtual SubCulture concert from this past April, featuring Shoshana Bean …
That year, Bill Clinton was the president, and he was younger than I am now. That year, there was only one show eligible for the Best Score Tony, and so it went to Sunset Blvd. by default. T…
I only ever saw Brent Carver play two roles, both of them men unjustly imprisoned. His Molina in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" was flamboyant, relentless, emotions splaying like a pinwheel. I w…
Ordinarily, the International Thespian Festival is a gathering of thousands of theater teens converging on a college campus in the Midwest to geek out about plays and musicals and connect wi…
I've found it punishingly hard to write music during these last nine weeks (nine weeks!), but I did manage to do this, a tribute to the great Bucky Pizzarelli and all the extraordinary jazz …
First we canceled the March show. We had planned a really beautiful show with Ashley Perez Flanagan, Zonya Love Johnson and Marcus Paul James for March 16, but then the social distancing ord…
I'm a huge fan of Shawn Colvin, she's an amazing singer, distinctive and exquisitely musical down to every inhale, and she's a monster guitar player with the best right hand on the circuit, …
