Posted on October 1, 2008 at 9:51 am

If Only the Cool Kids Could See Him Now (at Least Hear His Songs)
By BRUCE WEBER
New York Times, October 1, 2008

He was never much of a student, but Jason Robert Brown was a precocious kid. Growing up in Monsey, N.Y., about an hour north of Manhattan, he became enthralled by music at age 4, was taking lessons at 5. At his first recital — age 6 — he not only outplayed his teacher’s other students, he also supplied the verbal patter of a natural entertainer.

“He just started chatting with the audience,” his mother, Deborah Brown, recalled. “I was floored. Nobody knew where it came from.”

Once, before he could write in script, he filched a checkbook from one of his parents, wrote out a check and sent it to a mail-order record club. Fortunately he didn’t get all the particulars right, and the check was returned because it was unsigned. Teachers plucked him from third grade and plopped him into the fourth, not because of straight A’s but because he wasn’t paying attention.

“He was good in everything, but if it wasn’t music, he didn’t do the work,” said Mrs. Brown, a former English teacher.

Her son is now a 38-year-old lyricist and composer with aTony Award to his credit; he’s married (for the second time) with a young daughter and a faculty position at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has written scores for shows about adult subjects like anti-Semitism and lynching (“Parade”), and the dissolution of a marriage (“The Last Five Years”).

But in a recent interview he made it clear that he remembered the acute alienation he felt as the newcomer in fourth grade.

“It was horrible, really traumatic and not fun, and it took me the better part of 15 years to recover,” Mr. Brown said over dinner near the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in Manhattan, where his new show, “13,” opens on Broadway on Sunday. Adolescent anxiety is very much on Mr. Brown’s mind again these days, for it is the subject of “13.” The title refers to the age of the musical’s protagonist, Evan Goldman, a smart, smart-alecky, self-absorbed New York bar mitzvah boy scaling the heights of his postpubescent junior high school social set when his parents divorce and he undergoes a startling reversal: His mother moves with him from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a small town in Indiana.

The shock to Evan’s system unleashes his worst instincts before his best ones emerge, and one result is a character who reflects what a lot of people say about Mr. Brown himself: that once he engages he is bighearted and empathetic, but until then he can be impatient, self-involved and brash.

“His social graces are not his best thing,” said the playwright Alfred Uhry, who wrote the book for “Parade.” “He’s got his own light that he sees the world with, and I’ve seen him be highhanded with people. He comes on very strong, but if you can get past that, it really doesn’t matter anymore. Underneath it all he’s a sweet guy.”

Mr. Brown wrote the music and lyrics for “13,” working with Dan Elish and Robert Horn, who wrote the book. His score is full of hormonally fueled rock songs and melodic, Billy Joel-esque ballads about early-teenage concerns like the meaning of friendship, the cliquish strata of junior high school and the terrors of French kissing, but it is especially notable for its focus on the burning earnestness of youthful feelings.

“It’s the same angst that comes out in all my stuff,” Mr. Brown said. “I’ve never been particularly good at explaining or even understanding what this sort of rage is that is so accessible to me. I’m not an out-of-control person, but I can access in my work very easily a feeling of real fury. Thank goodness I’ve channeled it into my work, I guess.”

Lanky and dark haired with a jittery but forthright manner, Mr. Brown talks fast and doesn’t shy from opinions, particularly when it comes to music. In the past 10 years, he said, there have been only four musical scores that have engaged his interest: Adam Guettel’s “Light in the Piazza” and “Floyd Collins”; David Yazbek’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”; and Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s “Once on This Island.”

“The problem I have with a lot of other musicals is that either the songs have nothing to do with character, or the music is just lousy,” he said.

He paused as though considering whether to go on.

“I know I’m really good at writing for the theater,” he continued. “I can deny it all I want. Other people can fight me on it. It doesn’t really matter. It’s the thing I happen to know is my gift. And I am probably not one of those artists who is really comfortable with the sacrifices and compromises that commercial success entails.”

In “13” he brought his sense of musical integrity to a defense of what might well be perceived as the show’s gimmick. There are 13 characters in the show, all of them 13, and they are played by teenage actors, many of whom are as young as 13. The musicians, as well — two guitarists, a bass player and keyboardist and a drummer — are teenagers.

Mr. Brown was something of a prodigy himself. After high school he spent two years at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, but never graduated. He lived in Miami for a while, then at 20 came to New York, where he began playing in Greenwich Village piano bars.

In one bar he was approached by a patron, Daisy Prince, daughter of the director Harold Prince and a director herself. She was attracted to the sophistication of his musical palette and to his story songs, a penchant Mr. Brown said comes from the singer-songwriters he admired as a boy: Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Billy Joel.

“Jason plays for his life,” Ms. Prince said. “He’s a notorious piano-string breaker. That was sort of the first thing I noticed. And I love that kind of playing.”

With her Mr. Brown put together a revue of his compositions, “Songs for a New World,” which was presented in 1995 Off Broadway. Ms. Prince introduced Mr. Brown to her father, who gave him a job as a rehearsal pianist and later hired him to write the score for “Parade.” Set in Atlanta in 1913, the show told a dark historical tale based on events surrounding the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager convicted — possibly wrongly — of rape and murder.

Mr. Brown was 28 by the time the show opened on Broadway in 1998. It closed just two months later, a victim of lukewarm reviews and, probably even more so, of its grim story. Nonetheless Mr. Brown’s nuanced and atmospheric score won a Tony award.

“Jason’s work was courageous,” Mr. Prince said. “The big number in the show, the trial of Leo Frank, that’s as complex a problem as a composer and a lyricist can be thrown, and he just knocked it out of the park.”

That “Parade” was an economic flop and that Mr. Brown had begun to earn a reputation for elevated self-regard meant he did not have many job offers. “I think I turned off a lot of people in my 20s,” he said.

He went on tour with “Parade” as the conductor, where he met his second wife, Georgia Stitt, who was the assistant conductor. They eventually married in 2003, but in the meantime he began writing a song cycle that evolved into a show about his failed first marriage.

“The Last Five Years,” as the show was titled, is about an ambitious writer whose marriage to an aspiring actress falls apart as their paths diverge; he’s successful, she isn’t. Its story is told from two directions at once, with Jamie, the male character, singing songs that narrate events in chronological order, from courtship to collapse, and Cathy performing songs that travel backward in time, from the tragic end to the hopeful beginning. The two narrative paths cross only once — at the wedding.

Its particulars hewed so close to home that Mr. Brown’s ex-wife sued to have certain details excised. Still, the show presents neither character in an especially favorable light, and Mr. Brown acknowledges that it contains an element of self-chastisement.

“The writing felt like an attempt at an exorcism,” he said. “I wanted to not be angry about my marriage falling apart. I wanted to be able to have perspective on it without having to wait for 20 years to have some perspective on it.”

“The Last Five Years” played for just two months Off Broadway in 2002, but has become a popular choice in small theaters around the country.

“It gets done so often, and I get asked to go watch it all the time,” Mr. Brown said. “But the better the production, the less I want to see it. Because when the actors are really hitting it, it’s like having a knife pushed into my eyeballs.”

On its way to Broadway “13” has undergone substantial revisions, and the show has been a lot more work than Mr. Brown initially had in mind. “I’m resistant to say it on the record, but ‘13’ started in a very cynical way,” he said. “I really thought, ‘Everybody loves a bunch of dancing kids onstage, so let’s do a show with a bunch of dancing kids.’ ”

In any case, his nature took over the show.

“Every time I wrote what I was sure was the most obvious sellout thing in the world, and I’d pat myself on the back for it, it would turn out to be sufficiently quirky and weird that the whole show started getting more emotionally sophisticated,” he said. “I never even intended it to happen, but being in a room with the kids, as much as they enjoyed doing all the dancing around and the jumping, what I responded to was when they suddenly got vulnerable. It would just kill me. And I thought, any idiot can do what I was talking about doing, but I want to do that.”