Posted on February 2, 2012 at 4:36 pm

Marty Hughley’s review posted here.

Jason Robert Brown & Shoshana Bean review: Broadway stars shine with poignance and wit
By Marty Hughley, The Oregonian
Monday, January 30, 2012

Midway through the second set of his Saturday-night concert, Jason Robert Brown apologized for interrupting the flow of the music, but said that he simply had to comment on what had just happened. “You know it, I know it, it’s just the way it is: You will never hear ‘Still Hurting’ sung so beautifully again in your life!”

The song in question is from Brown’s 2002 Off-Broadway musical “The Last Five Years,” and it’s a piercingly poignant expression of emotional fragility following a heartbreaking divorce. But Brown wasn’t bragging, he was reflecting the glory back onto his guest star for the evening, Shoshana Bean, who just had made Brown’s song, already a finely crafted gem, into something truly sublime.

The two were in town together to perform and to work with local youth performers — especially those preparing a production of the Brown musical “13.”

Bean’s voice — a marvel of pure power, refined technique and judicious emotional expression — was the rich icing on the cake in the two-hour show at downtown’s First Congregational United Church of Christ. The cake — a varied program of songs by the Tony winning composer Brown, served up with sharp and engaging wit in both his singing and his between-song banter — would have plenty on its own.

The hometown favorite, Bean (a Beaverton High grad turned Broadway star of “Wicked”) sang about a half-dozen of Brown’s affecting tunes, including “Stars and the Moon,” which has become a cabaret classic since it first appeared in his 1995 show “Songs for a New World.”

Brown himself, though, sang with comfort and assurance, played piano with crisp rhythmic drive and harmonic clarity. And as artful as he is at mapping the tricky terrain of romantic emotions, he also can be hilarious, as he was in a song from his upcoming musical adaptation of “Honeymoon in Vegas,” turning on the campy lounge-lizard theatrics to sing “Thank the stars you’re in V-E-G-A-S — and that spells love!”

For fans of Brown and Bean, lots of moments on Saturday spelled love.

— Marty Hughley