Posted on August 23, 2016 at 3:27 am

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Megan and I have been going back and forth for about a year to find one night that we were both able to do a show together, and we finally landed here: Show #18, a muggy Monday night in August, with two hundred folks packing SubCulture to the gills to enjoy some fantastic music-making.

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I premiered a new song about the experience of dropping off my daughter at the same summer camp I went to as a teenager; my cover of the month was an impressionistic jazz arrangement of a great, underpraised Sondheim song; and generally I partied with my fierce augmented rhythm section. But then there was Megan. I’m pretty well burned out on “I’m Not Afraid of Anything,” but oh my God when she sings it, it’s a miracle. She personally requested “See I’m Smiling” (which I honestly think is the most difficult song in the entire score of The Last Five Years), and blew it out of the water. We then did a gentle re-harmonization of “The Rainbow Connection,” and an evening with Megan wouldn’t be complete without her showstopper from Smash, “They Just Keep Moving The Line.”

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She’s gorgeous, she sings like a dream, she goes to the mat to get it right, and she’s a dream to collaborate with. I said to Megan afterwards, “You know, you could afford to be a lot more difficult.” And she smiled at me and laughed and went off into the night, followed by a phalanx of fans, me foremost among them.

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Hallowed Ground (2016) (world premiere)
The Hardest Hill (2015)
A Song About Your Gun (2016)
Megan: I’m Not Afraid of Anything (from Songs for a New World, 1995)
Megan: Cassandra (from The Connector, 2016)
Break Me Blues (2012)
Children And Art (Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, from Sunday in the Park with George, 1984)
Something From a Dream (from The Bridges of Madison County, 2014)
Megan: See I’m Smiling (from The Last Five Years, 2002)
Megan: The Rainbow Connection (Music and lyrics by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher, 1979)
Megan: They Just Keep Moving The Line (Music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, 2013)
Melinda (2015)

Encore: Fifty Years Long (2015)

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JRB: piano, vocals
Megan Hilty: vocals
Gary Sieger: guitars
Randy Landau: basses
Jamie Eblen: drums
Benny Koonyevsky: percussion

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