Jason Robert Brown

I’ve spent the last four days writing the opening number to Honeymoon In Vegas. You would think that at this point in the process, three years after we started working on the show, we’d have the opening taken care of. That would be nice. In fact, this represents either the fourth or fifth completely different crack I’ve taken at the opening, not to mention all the little revisions and tweaks I’ve put in to those versions along the way. I think we’ve finally got it now. I’m really happy with it. But the opening has thus identified itself as ourRead More »

Brad Hathaway’s review here. Songs for a New World May 16-17, 2007 A Potomac Stages pick for thrilling performances with the composer at the piano Reviewed by Brad Hathaway Signature Theatre has presented concert stagings of musicals before, but it was outdoor in a park in Arlington. Now, they present a rousing, touching and often thrilling concert version of a show in the biggest enclosed space they’ve ever had. No 86-seat Gunston Theatre Two, or 136-seat Garage, or 399-seat Max … the Music Center at Strathmore has almost 2,000 seats. It is a room dedicated to music listening. The sixteenRead More »

I’ve played a couple of really cool places in my time. The first time I played Carnegie Hall was in 1992, when I was 22 years old and accompanying the Tonics (you can hear it here, and there’s even an adorable picture of me hiding in the mass of people on the front cover), and that was an overwhelming experience, especially since it was then broadcast on public television. I’ve played there another five or six times since then, often with the New York Pops, and it’s always thrilling to be in the middle of that kind of history. IRead More »

l to r: JRB, Gary Sieger (obscured), Tituss Burgess, Brian Dunne, Shawn Galvin, Brian d’Arcy James, Randy Landau (obscured), Alice Ripley and Laura Griffith in Songs for a New World at the Strathmore Music Center, May 16, 2007Photo by Margot I. Schulman. Celia Wren’s review here. Exhilarating ‘Songs for a New World’ By Celia Wren Special to The Washington Post Friday, May 18, 2007; C06 The siren call of possibility echoed from the stage at Strathmore on Wednesday, when Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World received a glitzy concert staging, co-produced by Signature Theatre. Musical theater darlings BrianRead More »

I saw three shows this week while I was in New York. Two of them received reviews of such overblown ecstasy that one would have expected to burst into spontaneous orgasm the minute the curtain rose. The other one got tepid reviews and is having trouble finding an audience. Guess which one I thought was the best? I’d heard about Coram Boy when I was in London last year; friends were raving about it when it was playing at the National. When I’d heard it was coming to New York, I expressed more than a little skepticism that it wouldRead More »