Jason Robert Brown

There has been such a sense of loss pervading 2016, so many icons of our culture gone, so much debased and distorted in our sense of ourselves as a nation, so much that is uncertain and uncontained in the world. I am choosing, in these last days of this exhausting and often unkind year, to focus on the fact that I have been able to make music with so many extraordinary people. Finding a shared space with other musicians is the thing that makes me feel like there is a way forward – a conversation, a collaboration. Thank you toRead More »

In honor of the 18th anniversary of Parade‘s opening night on Broadway (at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater), here is a rarity: a private demo of the opening number, “The Old Red Hills of Home,” recorded in New York City a month after our first reading of the show (at the Plays & Players Theatre in Philadelphia) in 1996. You’ll hear some interesting things here – my improvisations for the opening montage and the transition between 1863 and 1913; a verse for the Old Soldier that was subsequently cut; our original drummer, Tom “Partucci” Partington; and, on backup vocals, theRead More »

The solution seems further away than ever right now, I know. But we must remember them. We must fight for them. I believe – I truly believe – that we will get there, that we will get to a place and a time and a solution where what happened to these beautiful women and children can never happen again. We have to. Click here to view or download the piano/vocal score of “Twenty-Six Names.”

It’s a dream to play my music with these superlative musicians every month, but I have other dreams as well. I had a dream that Norm Lewis would do an Elvis Presley impression. I had a dream that Katie Thompson would sing my disco song into oblivion. I had a dream that I would get to spend two years making music and sharing so much joy and love with a wonderful audience at a fantastic theater. All those dreams came true, and there’s so much more to come in 2017. See you on January 9 for the next one. WhenRead More »

I arrived at the Library of Congress building at 11 am for a video interview (which will become part of the permanent collection), and Mark Eden Horowitz, the chief archivist in charge of the Musical Theatre collections, had laid out some treasures from the archives. Here was a sketch from West Side Story in Bernstein’s own hand, with some bizarre unused lyrics about a bullfight; here was Hammerstein’s drafts of “My Favorite Things,” showing the evolution of the song over several days of scribbles on a legal pad; here was a manuscript of Beethoven’s – Beethoven! – with crossouts, coffeeRead More »